Hi, my name is Pete Gazzaro.

I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast.

So great to be with you.

And today's topic is how grieving the pandemic can unlock revelation of God and ourselves.

How grieving the pandemic can unlock revelation of God and ourselves. And actually, this is a part one of two.

Now, at this moment of recording this, we've lost almost 450,000 people to this pandemic just here

in the United States and over 2.2 million people around the world.

It's just a staggering number of losses.

It's actually almost too much for our brain to comprehend.

And then, of course, there's the outside the human loss of all those individual people.

You have the family members impacted, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters,

moms and dads, friends, all impacted by those losses. Their lives changed forever.

Then, of course, you've got the smaller losses of job losses, economic upheavals, weddings, funerals, either cancel, postponed,

friendships, you know, unable to happen, people dying alone, heist graduations, births happening alone, again, let alone the impact on churches and community and ministries and

the poor, the poor around the world. It really is that pandemic is the World War II event,

actually, of our generation. And over these months, I've heard repeatedly, and I have this

inside of myself, this kind of attitude is even this phrase,

I just want to move on. I want this thing that'll be over so I can move on and get back to normal

and for church leaders and pastors and leaders, we want to get strategy. How are we going to shift,

how we do church, what's the future look like? And almost, like, I just want to get past this

thing.

And yet we find ourselves in this very long season of endings, of shedding, of dissent, of loss and grief.

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