Day 16. This is no April Fools joke. This is real. People are dying and yesterday even President Trump was forced to admit that social distancing, notwithstanding, hundreds of thousands of Americans will die and Americans will be under stay at home orders for weeks if not months to come. The United States is in a battle for “control” with a killer.

Control. We all want to be in control. We all try to chart the course of our lives and destiny . We hate not being in control. We are uncomfortable when we can’t predict our future; whether long term and short term. And even though we know in our hearts of hearts that we can never really be in control, we still try to have some modicum of what we tell ourselves is “control” over our lives. The Coronavirus is demonstrating for all of mankind that though we may believe (or fool ourselves) that we have or can exert control over our lives, the truth is otherwise.

Years ago I translated and published my first book titled, Heaven Sent, Stories of Faith and Effort. The original book , in Hebrew, was authored by a Jerusalem rabbi and its theme, expressed via stories, was a simple one. When it comes to money – earning a livelihood, making investments, wealth, poverty etc., man is not in control. He can and must make an effort but in the end man should know that success and failure is in His hands.

Whether one is a person of faith or not, each day’s brutal developments of this pandemic demonstrate all too vividly that we can not “control” the Covid-19 virus. All we can do, what we must do, is fight back and try to limit the human and economic destruction which it is causing.

We are not in “control”. It is an important life lesson.