Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, NASB)
The past year affected the world of golf in many ways. No riding in a cart together, maintaining social distancing at all times, leaving the parking lot within 15 minutes of playing, and then going home and watching the game on TV without spectators cheering on the pros. Ugh! Would the game ever be the same?
It was March 12 of last year when my wife Pat and I went into lockdown, a day etched in my memory. I was playing pickleball that day. My foursome was the last group playing when the manager of the gym came to us and told us he was shutting down the gym until we knew if the virus would continue to spread. On the way home I called Pat to tell her the gym was now closed and it looked like everything was shutting down, so maybe I should go to the grocery store and buy a few things. The mood in the store was like right before a storm. It was 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, but the lines were long and everyone had this look in their eyes that communicated we were “all in this together,” though no one really knew what “this” was.
2020 caught us asking questions we’d never asked before, from “Did you wash your hands for twenty seconds?” to “What about this Zoom thing?” to “Can we hug our kids?”
Then the vaccines started to get approved and our attention turned to the rollout. For those of us in an “at-risk” category, we wondered when it would be our turn and how the authorities were going to decide who would go first. Was the end really in sight? The fact that each state was doing it differently added to the confusion.
It has been a LONG time since I have been unable to hold back tears because I was so filled with gratitude.I won’t bore you with all the details about how we got our vaccine appointments, but I will tell you our grown kids convened a war council to figure out how to get through to the website and secure appointments with a million people vying for 70,000 slots. Six computers, an iPad, and 45 minutes later we had our two appointments. We arrived at the vaccination site and were asked to sit in the waiting area until it was our turn. It was only two minutes before I was assigned to a nurse. When I sat down at her station, I discovered I was tearing up. kept telling myself to “pull myself together,” but it was a battle the entire time I was being asked health questions and then receiving the shot.
I have thought of little else since then. I wanted to hug the nurse. I wanted to go back and do a better job of thanking all the men and women working at the site who guided us through the process. It has been a LONG time since I have been unable to hold back tears because I was so filled with gratitude. It was a wonderful feeling. I was filled with a desire to return to a more normal life and deep gratitude to God for designing men and women to help us along the way.
Hope deferred really does make the heart sick and we may not even be aware of it. But desire fulfilled is indeed a tree of life. God said it. It is our job to choose to believe it.
—
Bob Kuecker
March 1, 2021
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.