Re-, re-, re-something

I read my friend’s text, “I have alternated between teary and hopeful all day. It’s just more recalibrating.” Recalibrating. Yes. Constantly trying to re-standardize, to get back to true, to recognize the pendulum has swung again and nudge it back toward a balanced center without sailing off to another extreme, to grope for the rug pulled out from underfoot. Recalibrating.

Or, recalculating. I can still hear another friend’s GPS unit letting us know he was recalculating our route. He did it a lot since she didn’t consistently follow his initial directions, and that was one of his benefits—he could be ignored because he would recalculate. We were off course but not lost. He’d just recalculate a new path for us to the same destination.

And maybe that’s where I’m getting tripped up now. What is today’s destination? I don’t know how to recalculate when I don’t know where we’re going. In this season it seems we’ve flipped the script and it’s the destination that is the moving target and we’re spinning in a circle without a defined objective. It feels like we’re lost. I can recalculate until I’m blue in the face, but no course I chart will matter if there isn’t a destination.

So instead I find myself constantly reevaluating. I’m taking stock. I’m sweeping up all the scattered tidbits of routines and rhythms, of news and numbers, of feelings and fatigue, of hope and what ifs, and I’m staring at my pile before it blows away. I’m evaluating and reevaluating what was and what is and what may be.

In the midst of all the unknowns and fragmented feelings and changing recommendations, I know what’s unchanging. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He is true. I may swing wildly around Him, but He is unmoved and unmovable by my miscalculations. His will for me has not shifted with the whims of a virus. He can transform me and grow me in Christlikeness as tenderly in a pandemic as in the forgotten days of monotonous normalcy. And I can recalibrate because He is worthy of being calibrated to. He is the standard bearer. Always.