I love keeping options open.  Feels like a privilege of adulthood.  Try this!  Now try that!  Keep more than one thing on the table, so you can choose something else when new tastes or new knowledge or new desires come along.  Question everything, hoping to discover more truth along the way.  Maybe it's a personality type.  Maybe it's a learned behavior after too many times discovering in hindsight something I hadn't seen.  

I'm not alone.  In the American story (some say myth) choice looms large.  And it seems an even stronger value here in the Southwest—where options seem greater, individuals seem more individual, and libertarian streams run through the valleys. We feel more alive when we feel free, not hemmed in, able to make choices. 

But is freedom always about choosing?  I'm free to drive the streets of Scottsdale without fear because we've all agreed (with a little enforcement thrown in) to limit our choices when the light turns red.  "Oh no," you remind me . . . you're still free.  You can go through that light and pay the consequences—my nasty look, a ticket if caught, an accident, injury or death to yourself or another.  It's your choice to stop.  Ok.  But we know very few of us actually make that a conscious choice each time we see the light.  We have engrained habits of limitation---intuitively knowing that freedom turns in on itself and collapses if thought to be absolute.  Freedom requires limits.  We limit absolute freedom with proximate freedom—conforming to rules and norms that protect other liberties.  We limit in order to allow.  There's no society without those kinds of negotiations.  There's no absolute freedom.  

There's soft takes on this, like red lights.  There are strong takes on this too, like the obligation to protect reasoned dissent even when you're in power, or the obligation to dissent reasonably when you're not.  And our shared obligation, falling more on people in power, to work hard to protect an environment in which reason can chasten emotion. 

It's the Christian virtue of diligence, with a little temperance thrown in.  We temper extreme expressions of liberty for the sake of more fragile freedoms.  And we do so with the hard work of care, dialogue, process, decision, review, and reason: diligence.  

And so my point.  I thought of this when watching a local pastor of a would-be mega church on local TV Sunday night.  He was speaking with some eloquence about God's care for us in the midst of all things.  All beautiful and true.  And then he turned to the question of worship during the current pandemic, and wearing masks.  "We hear a lot of things out there," he said.  "And you have lots of opinions.  Some of you say we shouldn't be let in here without a mask.  Some of you say it's your God-given right to not wear a mask.  Well I say that it's your choice.  Wear a mask if you feel you need to.  Don't wear a mask if you decide not to.  God will protect us.  This is a worldly choice, so it can go either way.  Only Bible-values matter."  

Ok.  Maybe.  But I'm not so sure.  For this week I also read of a church in Alabama that decided on a week of revival meetings this month—masks optional, handshakes optional.  If you didn't want to, you didn't need to. . . . Sounds reasonable.  Feels American.  Freedom, with God to protect them.  And 40 of them now have the COVID.  "Seems like everyone in my congregation is sick," the Pastor told a reporter.  And a parish in San Francisco, where the priest allowed a wedding to proceed after gatherings were forbidden, with folks from around the country (including Arizona) present.  They went in the back door where no one would see them.  The health department got wind and an official went by to stop the ceremony.  Tyranny, it would seem.  The official moved them outside and asked some to watch the service online.  Even with that, several of the attenders had gotten sick, taking the virus back through airports to their home states.  It doesn't happen everywhere, for sure.  But it happens often enough.

I wonder if scripture hasn't modeled the virtues of diligence and temperance as part of how God does that protecting.  

"But life is full of risks," some rightly say.  And so it is.  But we can use diligence to make reasonable borders around our freedoms, to temper our passions and our lust for license.  And we can limit our absolute freedom for the sake of more fragile freedoms—like community, well-being, health, good use of resources, protection of the vulnerable, justice for those who can't choose.  And we can sacrifice a bit of our own convenience—diligently, temperately—for others.  And doing that might even help keep us free.  

I'm asked why we don't "open" church and let people decide for themselves if they'll come and how they'll protect themselves.  I respond, first, that we're not "closed."  Church is still alive and at work.  I also say that whether "opening" or "closing," the way we are shaping our physical distance is not finally about how each of us freely chooses to protect ourselves.  It's about protecting each other, and protecting the lasting virtues of community and not just the immediate experience of gathering.  

So right now, when we separate, we aren't alone.  Separation is our way of staying together right now.  It's not forever.  But it's now.  And both diligence and temperance will carry us through.  

It's a hard, but good, choice.