Giving COVID a Finger

Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.

There are some life lessons that would serve us well to learn early, and when we learn them later – mostly because of multiple mistakes that we can only make and learn from later, it becomes mighty painful.

Never Whittle Toward Yourself

My COVID Finger is not the one you might imagine. 

It was a simpler time. We were about six weeks into lockdown – you know, that moment of innocence when we knew it would be longer than a couple weeks but still believed, “the end must be in sight!” Our au pair introduced me to sauteed enoki mushrooms about a week before. I was hooked and had made them about four times already. 

I was holding the mushroom in one hand as I was cutting the bottom of the stalk with a butter knife in the other. I felt confident. A little downward pressure is all it took the previous times, and as a former Master Grill Operator at Waffle House after high school, I’m pretty damn handy with a knife. I frowned as I hit a particularly tough portion about halfway down and gave a good pull on the knife – or at least what I thought was halfway. When I pulled the knife, it cut through the remaining sliver and looked down at my index finger to see white. 

It wasn’t the mushroom. 

In what felt like five minutes but was probably about five seconds, I calmly set the mushroom on the counter and looked at my finger for an eternity, and thought. “Huh. I cut myself and it only stings a little. It isn’t bleeding, and I can’t decide if this is good or bad. But what’s that white thing?” It was the tendon. 

Protip: You should not be able to see your tendon – any of them! – at any point during meal prep, and as a general rule, seeing one of your tendons is usually suboptimal.

My (Un)Hero’s Journey

One of the strangest moments of my life was coming to the realization that I couldn’t straighten my finger. I sat there looking at it and told it to move, but no. What was weird is that during that moment I realized I could still move my fingertip, but not the middle knuckle. Ever eloquent, I observed, “Well that’s probably not good.” Then, seeing a little blood, I thought well that makes sense as I reached for a paper towel and realized – OH! This is not good!

After my bride’s decade in EMS and my work in chaplaincy and pastoral ministry, we’re pretty calm during an emergency. “Honey,” I said, holding my finger over my head, “let’s go to the hospital.” After over twenty years together, she didn’t ask. She rolled her eyes, grabbed her keys, and we were off.

This began a three-month odyssey of four surgeries and way too much time trying to heal, just to end up with a finger that still misbehaves even five years later. 

Lessons Learned

The reason I’m sharing this isn’t because I like the attention. It’s because I weirdly learned an important lesson about cooperation.

Paul writes that being Christian is like being part of a body. Some are hands, some are feet, and I usually add that every body needs a good sphincter – because I’m twelve, apparently. But without one of those parts, we may be able to function, but without all of them it will always be a little more difficult. 

I just ruptured the tendon for my index finger’s middle joint. I didn’t lose a finger, but it still twitches from time to time. It used to twitch more and cause me to drop things like cups if I wasn’t paying much attention. I could do what I wanted, but it was harder. Sometimes I think losing the finger would have ended up being somehow less intrusive because having a finger that’s at about a forty-five degree angle gets in the way of some of the finer tasks I’d otherwise do with that hand.

Healing isn’t wholeness, but it’s still healing.

We live in a moment when cooperation seems to be out the window and we talk past each other an awful lot. It’s not that we can’t function, it’s that the process of accomplishing day-to-day society stuff is a lot harder than it needs to be, because folks are too concerned with winning and personal liberties, and not concerned enough about the obligations we have to each other. 

It’s weird because we aren’t missing it by much when you take a step back. We agree about a lot more than we argue about. What worries me now is that the longer we play this dangerous game, the harder it will be to get straight again. 

I wonder – what we could achieve if we were willing to step forward without needing to even the score?

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Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.