This is the article Pastor Tim wrote that will appear in the Evening Leader on Monday, March 30, 2020
Well, we are a few weeks into this social distancing movement in response to COVID-19. I live by myself, so I have been spending a tremendous amount of time by myself. I have spent this time trying to learn new skills. I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned during this quarantine.
I made my first ever poached egg. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to do it. I cooked the first one a little too long, but after eating a few tough eggs, I can now make a mean poached egg. I have a couple of canning jar lids, which I put in my skillet with water so that the lid will stick out of the water. I get the water boiling, then crack an egg in each lid. Takes a couple minutes, long enough to make some toast. Viola! I have a quick and tasty lunch! Don’t forget some sea salt and ground pepper. This will be a regular part of my usual diet from this point on.
I moved out of my parents’ house 25 years ago. This past week, I learned something that I did not know before. You can put your shower curtain in the washer. I put it in on the delicate cycle and I am ashamed to say it came out a different color than it went in. If you have a designer shower curtain, you may not be able to wash yours, but if you bought it at Dollar General like I did, give it a try!
I have a wood laminate floor in my kitchen. I learned this week that you can mop that floor with this product called Pine-Sol Squirt and Mop. What you do is squirt it directly on the floor and mop it off. Not only does it smell great, it made my floor shine like I remember is shining when I first moved in. I am a master of sweeping the floor in my kitchen with a broom but now I see that running it over with a mop makes the whole kitchen look great.
Down at Wayne Street, we have put services on YouTube for Sunday mornings for the past few weeks. During this time, I learned that putting worship services online is harder than doing worship services live. There is shooting, editing, dubbing, splicing, and then uploading. This process takes HOURS after a service is conducted. It takes a small army to get the service from in front of the camera to loaded on YouTube. If you would like to join us for these services on Sunday morning, join our YouTube channel. Just search Wayne Street UMC on YouTube and you will see what is available. I am so thankful to Kurt Eversman and Josh Barnes for their help in getting our videos ready to post online. I am also thankful that our musicians were willing to get together as long as we were allowed so we were able to load experiences to load online.
The final thing I would like to share that I have learned is that by the time you read this article, I will have conducted nearly a dozen livestreams on YouTube. In the hopes of keeping people connected during this time of great disruption, I have been leading an online book study. We meet on YouTube every night at 8:00 p.m. The book we are studying is on prayer and everyone is welcome to join us. Again, follow Wayne Street’s YouTube channel and you will see our posted livestreams. Every night at 8:00 p.m., I have this weird experience where I talk to myself in a room by myself and people interact with me in the live chatroom.
So much of this I didn’t know, and then I heard of this thing called the Coronavirus. I have been finding creative ways to occupy myself. Some day soon, we will start getting back to normal, and we might even be shaking hands and hugging again. But when that happens, I may still be making online videos and eating poached eggs while having a super clean shower curtain and kitchen floor. Does that make this whole thing worth it? No, but it is something.
Now that you are done reading this article, go wash your hands.