The Gospel is Pure, True and Everlasting Trying New Things Whether We Want To or Not

Trying New Things Whether We Want To or Not

By Karla Jacobs

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed the banner photo on my profile is a picture of my son in front of a large mural that is a photograph of the Earth from space with a lovely sun flare peeking around the horizon. The younger version of my son looks adorable, but the point of the photo and its prominent placement in my Twitter profile is the T.S. Eliot quote: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” I took the photo on his first day of Space Camp at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. If anyone knows a thing or two about risking going too far, it’s the NASA space program. The men and women willing to strap themselves to rockets have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” again and again, in some cases all the way to the moon and back. In a few tragic cases, their risks have had deadly consequences. Many of the world’s greatest discoveries came with the risk of going too far. In a time when the settled science was that the Earth was flat, Columbus risked falling off the edge by sailing farther west than anyone known to fifteenth century Europe had sailed before. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first men to stand on the summit of Mount Everest. Marie Curie pioneered the science in radioactive materials that brought about advances in medicine to treat and cure deadly diseases. Her research exposed her to then little-known effects of radiation poisoning that later took her life. Thankfully, we aren’t all called to push the boundaries of human knowledge. In fact, we don’t have to push anything at all. C.S. Lewis said, “You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.” Isn’t that the truth? It’s kind of nice puttering along at idle speed. Until something pops up to make you change directions. Something like—I don’t know—a worldwide pandemic that hit us a year ago this month. We’ve now had a solid year of trying new things, whether we wanted to or not. The learning curve has been steep. Stephen and I had started teaching a fifteen-week series on Psalms to our high school Sunday school class when quarantine began. We moved it online and recorded a twenty to thirty minute lesson each week and uploaded it to YouTube. Once we got over the weirdness of talking to ourselves, the teaching part wasn’t hard, but we did have to pay attention to lighting and sound and remember to turn off the air conditioner when we recorded on the back porch so it wouldn’t cut on loudly in the middle of the recording. As the grocery shelves emptied, we had to get creative in the kitchen and try new things. Some innovations worked well. Homemade sour cream is delicious and, in some ways, better than store bought, and a cinnamon babka is not as hard to make as one would think. Other experiments, like substituting ground lamb for ground beef in the chili, didn’t work out quite so well.

We learned to go to church on Facebook and go to school on Zoom. We had family meetings via Microsoft Teams and played online board games with friends across the country. So many people started making sourdough bread that many joked sourdough starter was the new Tamagotchi for 30-somethings. (Tamagotchi was an electronic pet wildly popular with kids in the 90s.) Teachers with decades of experience in an actual classroom shifted to teaching in a virtual one. Medical professionals treated caseloads of patients that would have been thought impossible a year ago. Whole companies moved to online collaboration tools. Restaurants created new takeout models, and retailers began delivering goods curbside. Many shifted on a dime with only a weekend to prepare. We didn’t know we could do it, but we did it because we had to.

I know we all have pandemic fatigue and are ready for the darn thing to be over already, but we need to take a moment to acknowledge that we have done some very hard things this year. Things we can all be proud of. We are not all called to take the big risks that lead to big discoveries. But in the hard things we were called to do this year, we did them, and we did them well.

“You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.” C.S. Lewis

Karla Jacobs is a freelance writer, a soccer mom, and a community volunteer with deep family roots in the North Georgia Mountains. When not writing about pop culture, policy, and politics, she can often be found hiking backcountry trails with her family. She lives in Marietta, Georgia with her husband and their two teenage children.