“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo said to Gandalf, his guide, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Frodo had just received news of a rising darkness. Gandalf replied that he wished the same and “so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Like Frodo, we do not decide the challenges and illnesses we face; we only decide how we will endure them. In the spirit of Frodo, it is easy to wish that this virus had not happened in our time. . . .

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Two and a half weeks ago, a group of us from the law student reading group gathered at Three Kings for one last hurrah before Spring Break. Over pub chips and pretzels, we talked about life and law school and barely mentioned the coronavirus, which still felt like a distant threat. When we parted ways at the end of the night, we thought we were saying goodbye for only a few days. For those of us in our final semester, we certainly did not believe we were about to close an entire chapter of our lives. . . .

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Many of us are waking up to a world of suspended work. We will carry on, of course, but the load we can carry will not be what it was before. While healthcare workers and others pick up double duty, some will tend to children while typing emails, and all of us will wade through anxiety and extra precaution while attempting to accomplish our tasks. In whatever state we find ourselves, there is only so much that can be done. If we had fallen into the trap of defining our worth through our work, this season could come as a spiritual reckoning. . . .

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It might seem that now is a perfect time for catching up on all my reading. In a time when we must stay home as much as possible, those piles of pages beckon. But as I turn to those books, I start to think of others. The Carver Project has helped teach me something deeply important about reading: it may seem like an act of solitude, but in countless ways, it forms and takes shapes in community. . . .

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One of my academic mentors, Stanley Hauerwas, has observed that patience “draws on the Christian commitment to know how to wait in the face of difficulty.” Christians are able to wait because we place our hope in Jesus and our time is in his hands. . . .

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