Preparing…

It’s been a pretty crazy week. Well, we knew it was going to be busy, but on top of the “busy” came all kinds of “unexpected”.

Some weeks are like that. But I have a feeling it’s the first of a few more crazy weeks!

So let’s start with a little update regarding where Mexico is “at” when it comes to COVID-19. When I last showed you the charts, about a month ago, COVID-19 infections and deaths were still going up quite steadily.

But let’s look at a comparison. (The charts look different because I’ve zoomed in on the current ones.) Here’s the chart from a month ago, and the chart from today. You can see that new infections has largely levelled off:

So of course cases in the USA went up, cases in Canada levelled off, and so did cases in Mexico.

And now daily deaths, starting with the chart from last month:

So over the last month Canada’s numbers really went down, in the US they went down/levelled in spite of the drastic increase in cases, and in Mexico things have levelled off/gone down.

So on the 6th of July, a lot of things started opening up in our state, such as shopping malls and restaurants (with restrictions of course). This Monday, two weeks later, the next phase of opening is set to start. This will include a host of small businesses (although, let’s face it, many didn’t really close down), outdoor sports activities, hotels, and “religious services”.

The opening up does come with the usual warnings – wash your hands, wear a mask, continue “healthy distancing”, and so on.

Whether or not we’ll have a face-to-face service next Sunday I don’t know yet, but we’ve already been preparing for it. We met together (online) and talked about how we might handle things and what might need to be done. Like many churches, we’re considering a “hybrid” in which we will at least record, or maybe even stream online, as well as meet, at least for a while.

By the way, if we meet on the 26th, that will end 18 weeks of not meeting in person – just over 4 months. A third of a year.

This week we also had a meeting with our four preachers – your servant being one of them, and a man who is preparing to preach his first sermon another one of them! We shared a few ideas about preaching and sermon prep.

We certainly appreciate your prayers in a very busy time – busy for a lot of reasons, but I won’t get into them all in this post. But here are a few things that are coming up:

• Tonight, our “Discovering Life” Bible study.
• Tomorrow, our online interactive service. I will be preaching.
• Tuesday, our hermeneutics class continues.
• Thursday we attend an Avant seminar on church planting.
• Saturday we continue our Old Testament Survey course.
• Sunday —— !!! ?