COVID’s long tail and the unfolding mental health tsunami

I have read several articles recently that talk about the infamous COVID-19 long tail.  There are various accounts of people, having contracted the virus, who have had extended spells of convalescence — many aren’t out of the woods yet.  Prolonged fatigue is a common feature, a very heavy and felt achy body, as well as fever that can go on for weeks if not months.  Perhaps the scariest thing about COVID-19 is how little we still know about it — none of us had any idea really even six months ago.  With vaccines a year away at least, and with little confidence in their efficacious deployment (e.g. anti-vaxxers, non-availability in non-democratic regimes, among myriads of other issues) it can feel like a pretty hopeless situation.  More than ever, our global society desperately needs leadership.

There are many factors in this present season that are identifiable as tips of the iceberg, which just goes to suggest that there must be a plethora of issues that don’t see the light of day, including some of those things we’ll read about in years and decades to come.  We know how much of a concern mental health is in any day, and yet in this new day of COVID-19, we really do stare at the wall of water heading our way, which is the cusp of the unfolding mental health tsunami.  The frightening thing is none of us knows who and how we’ll be enveloped within it as it approaches with light speed — us, deer in headlights — to carry us with it away on a torrent that will continue rushing (as tsunamis do) seemingly indefinitely.  And it may be terrifying to not know where we will end up.  And the tsunami won’t discriminate to only those who are infected — that’s merely a tip of the iceberg issue.

This unfolding mental health tsunami is frighteningly obvious, and it is a calamitous warning for all who would hear.  I think of the words of wisdom in Proverbs 1:20–33.  Now is not the time to be complacent.  Now is not the time to deny the present health emergency that is nestled within the overall triple-whammy economic, social and medical emergency.  Now is the time to prepare to be armed with the knowledge of care that may be deployed for the self in the first instance, and then to our neighbour because they will need us.  If we have not first looked after ourselves, we will be useless, indeed a burden, in looking after others.

More true pastors will be needed than ever before.  Pastors not simply by name or title, but pastors by character to the sinews of their being.  Pastors, women and men, willing to serve their Lord in providing the safest pasture for anyone in the sheepfold that would call past for the sanctuary of care.  Pastors of an authentic Jesus ministry who will unequivocally commit themselves to the safety of every last one.  Pastors who will diligently give themselves over to God in the fashion of a care that covets self-health, as much as they can reasonably afford to procure it, much so they as Christian soldiers may be ready for action at the shortest notice.

Just as COVID-19 can have a long tail, in that it afflicts us only to linger for much longer than a normal flu would, this time of struggle in the first and second waves of the virus is merely a foretaste of what is to come in terms of whole society’s mental health burden.  Many people’s mental health is being shaped right now (especially those health and other frontline workers who are working to exhaustion), and there will be a latent lagging affect with spin-offs into addiction, depression, anxiety disorders, trauma, abuses, etc.  Cause can be indissoluble from effect.  Pastoral care in the heat of battle, and well beyond it, is essential.

Historically, certain seasonal aberrations have gone on to affect whole cohorts of people — for years and even decades.  What we have right now is a global aberration that will make an entire season look like a moment.  The proportions are absolutely incredible and were frighteningly unanticipated.  None of us would’ve picked this war, and yet this invisible enemy has picked us out.  And yet, as believers we must hold to the ideal that we’ve been brought to this situation for such a time as this.  Perhaps we even have a prophetic sense that this is our time to actually be the church.

I know the church globally is desperately seeking the Kingdom purpose in this hour.  What truly does Jesus desire from us or have for us to do in this present diabolical situation?  How are we to be the church when the rug of the church is being pulled from under us?  With this mental health tsunami looming, every pastor I know senses an opportunity to minister, and yet the opportunities seem too nebulous and too large to contemplate.  We are human capacitors ready to serve, fully charged and ready to go, and yet we don’t know how to tap into the opportunities right in front of us.  We may pray, “God use me/us in this situation, for Your glory, according to Your will,” but we may be more than a little confounded in not hearing the direction of the divine leading.

That is okay.  Our job right now is to prepare and to be ready for the unique calling God has for us as individual people, pastors and carers, willing to serve the struggling, to sit with the mourning, to hold the weary, to give practical assistance to those in need.

It’s okay if we feel out of our depth.  If we don’t feel out of our depth, we will be robbing those we serve by thinking we’re the power of Jesus ourselves.  No, it would be better to lead through bearing about in our bodies the lament that Jesus would have in ministering to the distressed, by relying on the Holy Spirit, not imagining we have the inside running on the will of God.  We cannot pretend that we know what is happening, but we can serve the best we can right now, and God blesses that very work of our hands.

Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash