Day 246 | Friday, 20 November 2020

Day 246 - Audio Version

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Day 246 | Friday, 20 November 2020
From the Church Mouse
This is the first Church Mouse since we reached 250,000 souls gone from the United States of America due to the COVID 19 pandemic. The day this number was reached, Nicole Wallace tried to put a human face on this dreadful human tragedy. In my counseling field, this technique is called using an emotional word picture. It is useful since you might forget an explanation of an event, but an emotional word picture stays with you forever.
So, we have lost 250,000 souls: gone from our Thanksgiving tables this year and from our family circles this December. These were mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters…..the list goes on and on. Let me describe this another way: If you were to read all these names, one after another, it would take you from Monday to Wednesday of the following week to complete the list. If you were to write the names of each lost soul on a PostIt note, place them one after another from the foot of the Statue of Liberty to the top of her upraised torch, you would have to repeat this process 23 times to complete the task. Many news programs complete their news segments each day with a “life well lived” obituary. If you  repeated each of these obituaries, it would take you to 2027 to complete the process.
I don’t know about you, but I will remember those emotional word pictures until I draw my last breath. By the way, at this writing, that number I referenced in the beginning of this Church Mouse has grown to 250,537 deaths…..and climbing.