By Emily Provance
I THINK OF WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, as the beginning. For me, two things happened that day.
First, I received a barrage of communications: emails, phone calls, text messages, social media contacts. “Who has a plan? What’s the Center for Disease Control (CDC) saying? Are other Friends cancelling worship? Are other Friends staying home?”
And second, I had to figure something out: where was I, as a traveling minister, going to go?
By Emily Provance
“The obligations of normal human kindness — chesed, as the Hebrew has it — that, we all owe.”
Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light
EACH MODE OF TRAVEL — bus, train, plane, automobile — has its own character. I find buses to be the most strange. They’re always cold, except when they’re hot. Transfers come disproportionately in the middle of the night. And even if you’re promised wifi and electricity, your chances are fifty-fifty of receiving either. Something about the combination of continual jostling, sleep deprivation, and the inability to fidget in your seat evokes a sort of twilight state that I don’t entirely dislike. The rules of the world change. You slip into magical realism.
