Recently, I noticed a heaviness of heart and a cloud of sadness billowing up inside of me. When someone asks me how I am doing, I quickly decide, like all of us often do, if I want to let down “My Guard” and answer honestly or just respond with the expected and polite answer that everything is good and I hope the same for them. But the expected and polite response is harder for me to generate these days. There is little energy behind it and even less honesty. “My Guard” is a ginned up Haiku that goes something like this:

“I’m good! How are you?
And how is your family? 
Hang in there, goodbye!”

“My Guard,” like the face mask I’m wearing to protect my questioner from the potential exposure to a virus I don’t think I have, does nothing to protect me. I’m already infected deep inside. “My Guard” is to protect my clients, my business associates, friends, and family members from me and the virus of depressive, hopeless feelings that without “My Guard” up, I would be shedding like a symptomatic whirling dervish. Now I know I have to get it together. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. I silently ask the Spirit for help and
am instantly reminded of a verse from John’s gospel where Jesus says to his disciples, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

This feels like good news, but I’m not sure I can take this verse out of context and apply it to my depressed, hopeless feelings. So I read backwards from that verse to find that Jesus is comforting his disciples in their grief over the news that he will soon be leaving them. Now I’m reading further back to find there’s a plot to kill Jesus because his message of love and life and his care for the poor, threatens the existing power structures of his day.

In an instant I know that the Spirit is talking to me. I sense an opening. My feelings of depression and hopelessness have something to do with current events threatening the power structures of my day. Battle lines are being drawn. Truth and justice are on the line. Birth pangs are felt but what will come of them? I read back further. A dead man’s family and friends are grieving. Hope is nowhere to be found. Jesus gets there too late. The situation literally stinks. Jesus is crying, too. But he commands the stone be rolled away from the tomb and the dead man to come out. And he does! “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” Lazarus was dead and buried. The world had moved on just as it always does. But no, here he is again, and this time things will be different.

But what power do I have to roll away stones? What power to call the dead to life? I fast forward beyond the verse where I started and read more of Jesus’ words of consolation and hope to his disciples. He talks about his love for them and the Father’s love for him and them. He is promising a Counselor that he will send, the Spirit of truth. Now I’m crying as I read Jesus’ prayer for his disciples. He loves them so much! And now he’s praying for me and all of those who will believe the message he is
empowering his disciples to share. Love is the Power!

I’m crying hard with a sense of hope and joy having received a visitation of the Spirit. My wife hears me and comes in from the other room to ask what’s going on. I finally let down “My Guard” and explain, “I’m a Quaker in the year of Covid-19”.

-Chuck Dickson
On behalf of the LFFM Clerking Team