If you are still trying to get through your toilet paper stash before 2025, there is something else you might be ready to consider while you wait for the tide to go out.

Things Haven’t Changed

For some of us, the new year has been a huge dent in a grand wall of expectation. We sent out good wishes and then, BOOM, one million COVID reasons to hide back inside our burrows.

Do you know what hasn’t changed, Mzansi? Desperate situations. Our people are still poor, hurting, and disillusioned. NGOs are still working in suffering communities. Domestic violence has escalated with stress and financial uncertainty.

Sickness and childbirth is now accompanied by anxiety about whether a bed will be offered in overburdened medical establishments.

A second wave of Covid-19 is also a reminder of missing billions, floundering leadership, and much grief.

Things Have Changed

Do you know what has changed in this second wave of death, though? We are now survivors.

Post-coronavirus society knows that there is light on the other side of our blacked-out social calendars. We know that alongside the flashing red death toll is a merciful recovery figure, a shining testament of how many people have walked through the valley and emerged mostly intact.

If you want to “speak life,” it’s time to start moving toward better things. You can’t hug your friends for a while, but you can text, call, video call and tag them. You can’t take your grandparents chocolates or cake, but you can bombard them and their caregivers with videos of your children and emails to be read aloud to them (like the “old school” letters they loved).

Give money to the causes that move you to compassion, and click to share their posts far and wide. Open your heart and your wallet again – the needs are still there even if your mask has obscured your view for the last few months.

You can’t date freely or party into the night, but you can maintain friendships, encourage your neighbours when you see each other, and intentionally support local entrepreneurs.

You can’t eat out much, but you can buy vouchers to keep your favourite establishments afloat. You can support free meal programs and fill up the formula coffers of the many baby places of safety that are on the edge of collapse.

There’s More to Life

If you’re jobless now, you have time to clear out clutter and donate to those less fortunate than yourself (they exist, I promise you).

If you’re anxious, you can offer compassion and words of affirmation to those you love to help you focus on life, not the struggle.

Read books, read scripture, exercise, and use the time well.

South Africa, the second wave is an opportunity to start living again. It is a new world but we still have values and connections as old as time. Don’t waste your life.

“Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don’t presume you will have it tomorrow, and don’t waste it today.” – John Piper

Published here.