The encouragement I find here is inspiring. There may be relief, somewhere down the road, if we can just wait it out while we do the best we can with our symptoms.

I wish the medical profession as a whole could be as forthright.

For me the answer to the originasl question, when to accept long COVID, is every morning when I get up. Life, wherever I find it, is new every morning.

I rejoice in the good days (even though they're not what I'd want them to be) and savor them. On a bad day (and they are more frequent than the good ones) I simply wait it out.

That may mean cancelling appointments, not making plans to see people, not taking on a scheduled task that goes beyond the limits of my physical lassitude and mental malaise. I may find that opening a can of chili taxes the limits of my endurance, and that making a salad and whipping up a simple one-dish meal is out of the question.

OK Lord... if this is it for now, thank you that I can still use a can opener and the chili, when I taste it isn't bad. Not long ago I had a dear friend die of ALS. In his last days he was eating though a feeding tube or not at all when he decided to call it quits.

I'm not there yet.

I'm thankful for what I have even while I wish it were more, that I'd get my life back as I used to know it and could somehow escape the bonds of what is. The present, however demoralizing, is what is and in the present there is hope. The trick is not to let the transient demoralizing factors occlude the eternal, where hope lives. My laments about the past, how I misspent it or what I lost, or my anxious projections and worry about the future take me out of the present - where my life is.

Living in the present isn't such a bad thing, whatever that present happens to be. It's there, in the present, that I can draw closer to God and listen to what He has to teach me in each present moment.

In my best of those worst moments I can still, in small ways if not big ones, serve others. And in that there is meaning, and at times, profound fulfillment. Maybe, as in a song I wrote years before COVID changed everything, it can be in something so simple as a smile for a stranger and a hug for a friend.

If you've read this far, here's one for you. God loves you and never give up hope.