Today my mom posted the following on our family WhatsApp chat.

“Flatten the curve” sounds like a new YMCA fitness program!!

Now those of you who know me, know that the Y has been both my vocation and my job for over twenty years now, it is the organization and people that have grown me up. And my mom is no stranger to the Y either. She has been a member of her Y in Maine for over four and a half decades now. Sometimes I think she gets the Y better, more deeply than I do. She will call me after a visit to her Y and give witness to the beautiful, inspiring, entirely mundane and yet wholly sacred moments she has seen. She sees the possibilities of what we, the Y, not the building, but you and me, what we can become and do as if it is the most real thing there is.

So when she said “flatten the curve” is the newest Y program it got me thinking. Now for the record of history, I write this as we as a country have entered into an unknown land. Schools are closed, restaurants are closed, we are working from home and social distancing in an effort to stop the racing spread of a virus for which there is no cure. Today Ys across the country closed their buildings, for now there are no group exercise classes in the gym, no kids learning to swim, no community being nurtured over coffee in our lobbies. And we are left with the question of who we are when there are no doors to open.

So back to “flatten the curve”. What if in doing our part to flatten the curve we relearn what it means to be be a movement, a collective force for good that meets needs, not because it is convenient but because it is necessary?

What if this is one of the moments for us as an organization where we become, yet again, what we were meant to be all along?

And I don’t wonder this lightly. Because I have come to know, in the deepest part of who I am, that becoming is always costly. It always demands loss and the sacrifice of comfort. And yet…

And yet…this becoming also brings brave, collective leadership. It brings ingenuity and grit in the face of very real danger (read COVID-19!). It brings a deep, steady knowing of who we are.

Here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t want to wait until we are through this to begin to become this. What if while we are all doing our part to collectively flatten the curve of this awful virus we chose to flatten the curve between who we are and who we might become? What if in all of this, we learn to care for one another as if your dignity as a human means as much to me as my own? What if through all of this, we decide that the well-being of the least of these means more to us than our individual freedom and comfort? What if through all of this, we become the community we have been longing for?