“For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun!  

Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness.  

I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” Isaiah 43:19 (NLT) 

Running a group home, we live with a consistent daily schedule. It is part of what helps our kids to feel safe and begin to build resiliency. Our life has a steady rhythm and we work to help our children cope with transitions in a healthy way. As we watched our schedule fade away during the Covid stop, we felt like we had wandered into the desert, isolated from friends and family and the routine that helped our days run smoothly. We had three weeks with no school, we watched the global and national news go from concerning to scary, we were trying to calm anxious kids without having answers to most of their questions. We repeated that we were going to take it one day at a time and that God was still in control. 

We worked to make a “new normal.” We had school from home, work meetings online, created family P.E. for exercise, took a morning walk together. The pace was much slower, but these reliable and consistent activities brought structure to our lives. We still had some of our old schedule; we had family chores, bedtimes, dinner together every night. Like everyone else in the world, we found creative ways to do all the things we couldn’t go and do.  We recreated Philly for our daughter’s senior trip. I even made her run up and down the stairs at a barn until she had run the same number as the “Rocky Steps,” complete with a cardboard standup of Sylvester himself. I was supposed to do surf lessons in Cali with our other daughter for her senior trip- it became paddle boarding on a pond, the closest we could get to waves in Middle Georgia.   

We played kickball and whiffle ball, had picnics at a waterfall on the ranch, gardened and baked.  We enjoyed drive-in church from the parking lot of the little country church our son-in-law pastors and watched our own church services online each week.  Each of these little details watered our souls during this time.  It helped my husband and I get through a long stretch of kids 24/7.  Was life still messy? Did we live in continual peace in our household and sing Kumbaya each night? Hardly. Those tough days that ended with me hiding in my closet crying because I was exhausted were still faithfully watered by God.  That scary stretch of wasteland called “longest summer of my life” was created anew.  God provided us with a different path through our wilderness summer; we could look at all that was stopped and see that life wasn’t dead.  What had seemed desolate at first was pulsing with life, the rhythm was just not the one we recognized. We came to the conclusion that God was showing us that everything we were doing before wasn’t supposed to be picked back up and lived the way we were before.