A small story:

The head of the youth program, the former head of the youth program, my teaching partner and I stared at each other across Zoom.

"So," one of us said, "We're officially ending it?"

The other three nodded; in that silence, one more thread to the past was cut.

My friend and I had, for the past nearly three years, taught Sunday school to the middle-schoolers, which was a fair amount of me ranting and my co-teacher - an actual professor - bringing my rants back to the House and the Guy.

We had begun this almost on a dare:

"You, College Professor, are quietly skeptical and you, Quinn, know a thousand unnecessary facts. Like the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, no one lasts longer than a year with the middle-schoolers. This should end well."

Weirdly enough, it did. In fact, my partner and I acted as force multipliers on each other, sparking and ranting and generally keeping middle-schoolers off their phones. We didn't care what they believed, we knew you don't teach faith and had no interest in it, anyway.

We also knew middle-schoolers pick up adult hypocrisy the way sharks pick up a torn cuticle. Luckily, telling the truth and not being invested in their answers to open-ended questions made the hour fly past. We heard from parents that our kids actually came for Sunday school.

A year ago, my friend and I were asked to help teach @OurWholeLives to that same cohort.

Wide-ranging year-long classes where sex is discussed with people who will hate every second of it?

DON'T HAVE TO ASK ME TWICE.

We taught. It was fabulously uncomfortable.

And then, January, February...March. With hours notice, the classes and Sunday School were cancelled. We tried to continue Sunday School, first on Dischord and then Zoom but the alchemy we had taken for granted over two years turned out to be too fragile for telecommuting.

I had never realized how much of our conversations came from a motion I saw out of the corner of my eye, a witchy sense a 14 year old was texting in their purse. My co-teacher and I had walked out of every Sunday School class before March drained but elated from the sparring.

After Zoom, we were just drained. We weren't the only ones. The kids slowly started to drop out; they said they couldn't take another hour staring into their computer. I am convinced 2020 happened because some kid wished on a monkey's paw for "Unlimited screen time."

In the meanwhile, we were hearing rumors from organizations about serious budget shortfalls. Museums are in danger of closing. @Vromans sent out an email warning that, after over a hundred years in business, we were in danger of losing them.

Movie theaters might not come back in any real way. More colleges are teetering on the brink of financial collapse than any parent who just wrote them a check wants to hear. Gyms, hotels, theme parks are going to have to design a completely different revenue model to survive.

Anyone over the age of two understands the concept of change. Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with adulthood knows everything keeps changing all the time; we may not love it but we grudgingly accept it.

This isn't change as we have ever experienced it.

Imagine your old life was a big, tiny-brained dinosaur, eating a plant.

Then your old life noticed something very bright arcing through the sky at it.

Our old lives were meteored and are now mostly ash.

Science tells us things live through cataclysms.

Not everything.

We in the Youth Program had delayed the inevitable as long as we could but there's really no ignoring a meteor. We agreed to let the families know it OWL wouldn't finish. I suggested writing a goodbye letter to the kids; the others agreed.

Having finished business, we chatted. Because she is kinder than I am, my co-teacher asked the Youth Minister how she was doing.

"Eh," she said, then added, "On top of everything else, our apartment has rats."

We commended her on the 2020 shit sprinkles.

"The good news is," she continued, "A friend has offered us their guest house on their property in Montana, for the winter. We're leaving next week."

I started. She had suddenly moved into the position of Youth Minister less than a month ago and now we're losing her?

That was my stupid old-life dinosaur brain; if we're not in a building together one day each week, what does it matter where she lives?

"Our friends have horses and chickens," she said, "My kids are out of their mind with excitement."

We wished her a peaceful trip.

I got off the phone, thought a while, then opened the laptop and wrote out a goodbye letter to the kids and to everything else.