Tracking Life's Pandemics

I shot an email to the members of my memoir-writing class reminding them that “The Pandemic of 2020” will go down in history with as much memorability (!—is this a word?) as the flu epidemic of 2018-19). This, I said, is a good time to take notes, write up little vignettes, clip significant articles and stick in a file as a legacy project for those generations that come after us. I wrote the following letter to my neighbors on Hawthorne Lane, then autographed 10 books, sanitized everything I had handled, slipped them into new slide-top plastic bags, made a hanging device with two interloping sturdy rubber bands, then walked them down the street and fastened them to the outside of each of the nearby mailboxes.

March 20, 2020

Dear Neighbors—

(I have washed and sanitized my hands while handling this letter.)

We have lived on Hawthorne Lane for the last 40-some years. We have also been in ministry all our married lives (almost 59 years come June!). That means we have specialized in the “people-business” all those days. And because of that, I just wanted to reach out with a reminder that in the midst of bad, rough or inconvenient times we do not have to be afraid.

We have also experienced rough stuff. Twenty-or-so years back, our national radio ministry, which aired daily on some 500 religious outlets, came under attack by some ultra-conservative folk, which led to a decline in our donor revenues. We needed $10,000 a day to pay for our 45-some staff and our radio bills. Income declined to $3000 a day. This quickly led to a debt of $2.6 million. We closed down the media outlets while remortgaging our house (the brown one two houses from Route 59).

How does a couple get through this? By choosing to believe that there is a good God acting on our behalf, despite what the circumstances seemed to be saying.

Five years ago, our youngest son contracted a rare lymphoma, and after a gruesome struggle with cancer, died of the treatments as much as from the disease. He left a wife (who is a wonder-woman!) and three small children, then ages 6, 4 and 6 months.

How do parents get through an event that threatens to tear apart the fabric of their belief-system, if not their marriage? Same answer.

However, that experience of finding God, not only in the everyday but in the raw passages of life, has been fueled by what we came to call The God Hunt. This is more than just the practice of positive thinking, though it certainly includes that. It is not a denial that life can hand us wretched moments. It certainly does. It is a system of living that helps us see what is beautiful in the everyday.

We are concerned that some of you may be battling with anxiety, may feel you are going to lose everything, have had too many life blows and this pandemic with its accompanying financial collapse is threatening to put you under (the last blow), or you have no one in your life you can count on and do not need any more isolation.

This book may help. But more than that, we, the resident ministering couple up the hill on Hawthorne Lane, are just a phone call away. Feel free to contact us.

Hang in there!

What I’m wanting to collect are all the good stories that come out of this season of isolation. My "Near Neighbor" app has many volunteers who will do a shopping run. There is a photo of a care box that was left outside the door of a single mom with small kids who needed some help. We’ve never lived through a time exactly like this. We might not experience anything similar, or of this magnitude, again. Someone also suggested that we all hang out American flags as a message of solidarity. I have six that I hang out for the Fourth of July (!), but I think I’ll limit it to just one outside the front door.

Mostly, I am deeply curious. What is God going to do through all this? How is He going to use this to produce something remarkable and good in our private lives and in our national endeavors? I sit in rapt anticipation...

Karen Mains

Reminder!

The Soulish Food e-mails are being posted biweekly on the Hungry Souls Web site. Newcomers can look that over and decide if they want to register on the Web site to receive the biweekly newsletter. You might want to recommend this to friends also. They can go to www.HungrySouls.org.

Hungry Souls Contact Information

ADDRESS: 29W377 Hawthorne Lane
West Chicago, IL 60185
PHONE: 630-293-4500
EMAIL: karen@hungrysouls.org

Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
by Elizabeth Cline

SALVAGING

I’m really into salvaging. All my clothes are from resale shops. The accompanying photo, apart from the cap, which I’ve had for over thirty years, cost me a total of 29 dollars. Jacket—$22. Culotte pants (50% off at Goodwill) cost $4. Cotton pullover sweater with the store tags still attached (also 50% off for orange-tagged garments) cost $3.

Our furniture is all secondhand (or rescued from the curbsides). I’ve always been willing to take what other people didn’t want. Either I would find a place for it or find someone else who needed it. Now, I realize I’m part of an international movement—without knowing I was a member.

Rebecca Burgess, in her book Fibershed, lists the horrendous costs to the environment of the unregulated clothing industry. Just one fact that should give everyone pause:

“The fibers in our clothing also have alarming narratives. Polyester, an oil-based synthetic fiber, is used in 60 percent of our garments today, more than double the amount used in 2000. It consumes nearly 350 million of barrels of oil every year and accounts for 282 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, three times higher than the amount for cotton, which will make it increasingly difficult for the world to meet the two-degree Celsius climate goals set down in the Paris Agreement.”

And this quote from The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good by Elizabeth L. Cline:

“The garment industry is among the world’s largest carbon emitters, water polluters, and users of toxic chemicals. A third of the microplastic pollution junking up our oceans is coming from what we wear. A garbage truck’s worth of unwanted fashion is landfilled in the United States every two minutes. And in an industry that makes some people so fantastically rich and famous, there are somehow only a handful of garment workers earning a living wage anywhere.”

The book we’re recommending with this Soulish Food is Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth Cline. Although this book is not written for the religious marketplace, it should challenge all of us who feel we have been the godly assignment of being good stewards of the His beautiful earth. It should particularly inform those of us who take pride in being diligent “thrifters.”