If you drive a lot in Connecticut, you might have noticed a strange jog in the north-south highway, Route 91, near the Massachusetts border. The highway crosses the Connecticut river, and then it crosses back. Maybe you’ve wondered why. I know because I grew up in the town that forced 91 to go around: Suffield.

The Zoning and Planning Board of the town of Suffield, CT — the community’s most powerful political entity — heard the proposal from the state that 91 would make its way through and said, “No thanks.” Today, 91 goes around Suffield and through Enfield, and Enfield has become a strip mall strewn retail way-station between Hartford and Springfield. Suffield did not want to be that, and it isn’t, at the great inconvenience and expense of Connecticut’s transportation authority.

None of us enjoys inconveniencing other people, but boundaries are essential for our integrity and health. One of the many challenges of the pandemic has included figuring out some new kinds of boundaries. Never did I expect to ask a person in the post office to step away from me, or to ask the nurse treating me to pull up the mask that had slipped down her face. I did both within an hour recently. 

As an outgoing person who likes to make people happy, I have had to train up over the course of my professional life on setting boundaries. The first book I read on the topic 25 years ago, “At Personal Risk: Boundary Violations in Professional-Client Relationships” by Marilyn R. Peterson (W.W. Norton, 1992), blew me away. When I read it for a class, I was managing a college dormitory with several students with significant mental health challenges. Living and working with them presented many opportunities to practice setting healthy boundaries, but I honestly had not known such practices existed before I read that book. I devoured it, and as soon as I finished, I read it again. 

Since then, I attend the boundary awareness trainings my denomination requires and participate in my university’s compulsory sexual harassment prevention courses. Every time, I learn something new. I make a great production of not complaining about such requirements, given my many experiences seeing the damage that poor boundaries can do to a community. 

I wonder how those trainings might need to change with the demands of the pandemic? I can imagine a new slide in the PowerPoint deck that reads, “Make your own choices about how to manage the risk of infections, and do not question the choices of others. Never accuse another person of paranoia or politicization when they seek to set a boundary with you, and never apologize for the boundaries you choose to set.”

To protect and care for ourselves is not a matter of selfishness, but stewardship. We have been given a tremendous gift in this one life we have to live. When we protect it, we honor the One who created us. When we protect others, too, all the better; good stewardship all around.

Gunnison, Colorado escaped the Spanish Influenza pandemic through a policy of radical sequestration.* The trains through Gunnison usually brought people to the town from every direction, but during the flu outbreak, Gunnison flagged those trains along. Roads in and out of Gunnison were closed, as were all gathering places, including churches. The two waves of the flu that ravaged the planet resulted in exactly zero cases for Gunnison. They told the world, “For a time, you are going to have to go around.”

We are all tired of Covid-19, but evidently it isn’t tired of us. Therefore, we set the policies that feel right to us and respect when others do the same. As much as we care about making people happy, and want to make things easier for them, right now is a time we ask that they cross the river, stay on the train, and do whatever it takes to honor our boundaries. We do so in part because the lives we have, as created beings, aren’t a privilege but a gift we’ve been invited to tend with loving care.