Masks

It’s not hard

Wear a mask. For heaven’s sake. It’s not that big a deal to be a big deal.

And if you want to feel better about it, get in touch with this person. Brynn is making masks with the proceeds going to the Children’s Hospital in Saskatoon.

I wish I could talk with my grandparents about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Maybe a little bit of life lessons could be shared if we are willing to listen. My mother tells the story of my great-grandfather taking the team of horses in to town to get a casket for one of the children. A neighbour farmer caught up with him to tell him to get two more; his wife and another child were dead.

Makes us think twice now about how much we’d like to pop in to our local favourite restaurant for a noodle bowl.

J.R.R. Tolkien on dark times and hope

This is from a post by Tim Villegas who shares what Sam and Frodo can each us about living in dark times.  Sometimes everything you need to know has already been written by R.R.R. Tolkien. This “simple, hopeful message about our future” is Sam’s speech from The Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

“It’s all wrong. By rights, we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.

But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn’t, because they were holding on to something…That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”