I have Facebook friends in New York and Detroit who are posting about the devastation that this virus has brought to their cities, friends, and families. They know health care workers who are infected or who are living away from their families and haven’t seen them in over a month. They know people who have died from the effects of the virus. They have church families who have lost loved ones or who are still fighting the virus.

I live in Houston, TX. Major suburbia. In Harris County, the county that is Houston, we’ve had 3700 some odd confirmed cases and 46 deaths. That’s out of a population of 4.7 million. I know of one family in Kansas (they moved from here) and one family nearby who very probably had the virus in early March, but neither was tested because tests weren’t available at the time unless you were hospitalized. I know of no one who is hospitalized for Covid-19 nor do I know anyone who is having Covid symptoms and staying at home. I think most people here are like me. Despite my concern for people in other places, it is hard to grasp that the numbers mean death and suffering for real people. And that it could come here eventually.

And so in the rest of the country, the not-so-infected (yet), the natives are getting restless. There was a protest gathering in the state capital, Austin, yesterday where people were yelling for Governor Abbott to rescind the stay at home orders and let Texans go back to work. On the one hand, we see the pictures and read the news reports, but until it happens to us, to someone we know, it’s just not Real. Many people here in Texas are still saying it’s overblown, too many restrictions, crazy government overreach. Then, others say they won’t be leaving the house until there’s a vaccine. I fear that there is no good way to emerge from this crisis and that our political and regional differences will be exacerbated rather than healed because the suffering really isn’t “shared” in the sense of every region and people group suffering the same effects.