7 Tips for Surviving the Long Covid Winter

Christmas has passed. The bitter cold lingers. Covid restrictions remain in place throughout the country, still limiting our interactions with friends and family. The promised vaccine is still months away for most of us. 

These long winter months portend insult upon injury for millions of Americans already struggling with isolation and depression from the pandemic.

But with the eyes of faith, helped by a steady diet of prayer and creative work, we can see our way through the darkness of this Covid winter by fixating on the light of Christ rising at Easter. Here are seven tips to help us persevere.

1. Ask God for His perspective.

   God’s ways are not our ways—that is a truism easy to say, but hard to live. Pray for the grace to see these long months as part of God’s will for us. We may never understand why He has sent this challenge, but we do not need to. Instead, in humility we can follow Jesus’ counsel to become like little children, allowing God to lead us as He likes, trusting implicitly that He has our salvation in mind. Even if the going is tough.
   
   

2. Remember the desert.
   

   In this time of cold and isolation, we can feel like we are in a spiritual desert—alone in the barren landscape. Throughout Judeo-Christian history, believers have entered into the desert to purify themselves of worldly desires to live a more God-focused life. “The desert,” teaches Pope Benedict XVI, “becomes the place of reconciliation and healing.” Rather than focus on our Covid-prompted discomforts, let’s use the quiet to look inward, examining our consciences to find the places in our soul that need healing.
   
   

3. Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet daily.
   

   Healing comes from God’s mercy, and what better way to call down that mercy than by daily praying the Divine Mercy Chaplet while reflecting on our Lord’s passion. Let His mercy pour over all our anxieties, fears, and sins. And if there are any sins whose bonds we need to break, let this be the time to do so.
   
   

4. Write a letter (or several)—with pen and ink.

   Think of the person, or persons, to whom you wish to express your current feelings, and write a letter to each one—on paper, with ink, and then send it through the postal mail. Write to friends with whom you do not regularly communicate, and share your thoughts with them. In doing so, you will feel as if you have companions at home with you, both as you think about what to write and as you write. Plus you will be doing an act of charity, bringing joy to your letters’ recipients.
   
   

5. Clean the thing (or things) you dread the most.

   We all have things or areas in our homes that need cleaning—the overstuffed closet, the back room filled with junk, the cabinet filled with decades-old paper. Force yourself to confront this mess, and clean it out thoroughly. Doing so will focus your energy away from your current problems to a new one, and, when done, will bring you a tremendous sense of accomplishment. By extension, if you can triumph over this long overdue task, you can triumph through this long Covid winter with a similar resolve.
   
   

6. Pray for patience.

   Life in the desert, while intended to be spiritually healing, is always physically trying. These winter months are also trying. We must ask God for patience to bear each day, one at a time, and to allow Him to work in our souls. God will only transform a willing heart; a resentful heart closes itself off from Him.
   
   

7. Look to Easter.

   Easter this year is April 4, when both the winter, and, we pray, Covid, will be in retreat. Having fasted spiritually through these months—an extended Lent—let us rejoice knowing that Christ’s resurrection is our ultimate hope. It is He, and not the pains caused by disease and suffering, that have triumphed over the world.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. teaches at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York, and online for Catholic Distance University. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith: Catholicism and the Challenges of Secularism and Staying with the Catholic Church: Trusting God’s Plan of Salvation. Visit his website at www.davidgbonagurajr.com. Twitter @davidgbonaguraj.