We've all seen the diagram of the steep curve vs the flattened curve that amazingly peaks just below the point our heathcare system can handle. It makes us feel good, like we're saving lives and making the world secure.

But if we all stay shut in our homes for weeks or months to prevent a spike, how does it ever end?

If you let us out of our cages, most of us remain walking time bombs without immunity. Yet Americans won't agree to stay home for the 4, 6 or 12 months such a slow burn requires.

So flatten the curve may be textbook public health strategy and a media-friendly graphic, but on closer look it doesn't seem like a serious objective. Instead, we're just trying to buy time, pushing the steepest curve forward by convincing the public to hunker down two weeks at a time (twice so far in Utah) and hoping for a miracle before people realize the true time frame of following the flat curve to the end.

Our real hope is deliverance — a cure and eventually a vaccine, a weakening of the virus, miraculous herd immunity — because we're not fully able/willing to flatten the curve. Joining in prayer and fasting for divine help is not an empty gesture here. We're in an untenable situation and need a loving, merciful God to guide us to solutions or get us through times that may be tougher than we imagined.