Pineridge Blog

It has been raining a lot lately. I can never re-member from one year to the next if it was this wet last spring or the one before, but Weatherfolk say the recent total rain-fall is close to the average for May.

I do have a clear memory of what it was like in the church last May. It was far from average. Last May we were a couple of months into quarantine. Total cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVED were climbing exponentially. We were careful to wipe everything down. Trips to the grocery store were ventures into hostile territory. Church was all online, but somehow, we had made it through Easter and were kind of getting the hang of the Zoom thing. There was a feeling that the sprint to the end of COVID-19 was turning into a marathon.

Now a year later things are changing again. Not fast enough for restaurants and businesses devastated by the shutdowns. May-be too fast for those who have gotten used a quieter lifestyle. But they are changing as we each make our own way back into the new normal of the post-COVID world.

On the advice of the church medical team, the Session is surveying the rate of vaccinations in the congregation. There was a lot of discussion about privacy, as there should be. The survey is confidential, nonscientific and no one is under oath.
We looked into selling all of your personal information to Facebook to raise money for the budget, but FB said they had it all anyway. Just kidding…

The results are very interesting— 98% of the 170+ people who have responded say they and their households are currently vaccinated (85%) or planning to be in the near future. Only a couple said that they had no plan to be vaccinated soon.
Several of the comments were from parents who said they ap-preciated worshippers still wearing masks, because many kids have not been eligible to receive the vaccine yet.

If you don’t like still putting on a mask, just remember, “It’s for the children.”
If you haven’t had a chance to take the survey yet, it quick and totally painless.
The link is: https://forms.gle/pcDiJwWcH53vAbJz8  100% of those who responded have reported no physical side effects from taking the survey. The real effect is understanding how we are each doing the best we can for the health of all.