If you’re tired of the coronavirus, I get it. I’m tired of it, too. We keep hitting milestones—the start of school, the new year, the end of school, the start of school again—but each time, we’re never as far along in handling this pandemic as we’d hoped.

In fact, the optimism of Americans has dropped so much that now more than half say they think the worst of COVID-19 is still to come.

Patience is not my spiritual gift, so it’s easy for me to quit paying attention to the latest information. It’s easy for me to get irritated with reinstated mask mandates at my kids’ school—I thought we were done with that! It’s easy for me to feel frustrated when we keep dealing with this and I just want it to be done.

So it was good for me to read Joe Carter’s explainer on the Delta variant. He clarifies what’s happening—not what I wish was happening—and reminds us not to grow weary of doing good (Gal. 6:9).

God hasn’t called us to scoot past viruses and variants as quickly as possible, but to “do our best to ensure that the actions we take to protect our neighbors from these deadly viruses are based on how we believe Jesus has called us to love others.”