290 EDITOR’S NOTE EDITOR’S NOTE Holly Tubbs Editor-in-Chief I used to wait around for something to happen. The future seemed to stretch out before me with the grey repetition of an empty highway. Milestones, once obscure shapes in the distance, approached quickly and passed in a dull roar, the way a road disappears under the hood of a moving car. I was merely along for the ride, buckled in the backseat of life’s journey. Then 2020 arrived, and something finally happened. Actually, a lot of things happened, and I found myself wondering if I ought to have been more specific in my appeals to the universe. Rest assured, reader, this isn’t a cautionary tale against wishful thinking, though I would bet the onset of COVID-19 spooked those of us petitioning for an extended spring break. I remember when the email came through on March 12, regretfully instructing the student body to hold our horses and prepare for a remote return to the semester, until further notice. For many of us, the severity of the health crisis had not resonated. Pandemics are threatening, and threats are hard to hear. When classes resumed (reZoomed?), there was distance between members of the Harding community, and it was unfamiliar, unnatural and unwelcome. Upon our return to campus in August, reunions were reduced to eye contact and air-hugs. Seating was limited, chapel was virtual and events were cancelled. Inevitably, these disappointments filtered through my preparations for the yearbook. I asked myself, who is going to want to remember a year like this? Then the beauty of human resilience began to peek through the COVID clouds, and I heard a voice of invitation. It was my roommate, inviting me to dinner. It was my professor, inviting me to pray in her office. It was the Homecoming parade, inviting us to float; a winter storm, inviting us to throw a snowball. It was the voice of God, inviting us all to trust in Him. And so, after months of editing spreads between Plexiglas barriers, working alongside a staff of talented thinkers and challengeing my English-major mind to lose the Oxford comma, I can confidently say that we put the year in yearbook.
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