March 11, 2020

The day everything changed.

Looking back now, I honestly cannot believe it’s been 4 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thinking back, I remember assuming that 2020 was shaping up to be a normal year. I was young, I was homeschooling, I participated in a church program on Thursdays, I was a major sports fan, and everything seemed fine. Everything seemed fine. Everything seemed fine.

Until the world shut down.

At the beginning of March, reports began surfacing of this virus called Covid. It started in Asia but quickly spread worldwide. However, cases in Canada (my home country) were minimal. At first.

March 11 started off a normal day, except for the ever-present subconscious worry in my head of “What if it keeps spreading…?”

Then, in a figurative instant, the world changed forever. Within a matter of hours, all sports leagues and events were shut down indefinitely. Workplaces soon told their employees to work from home, and schools began thinking of ways to implement this brilliant idea called at-home learning.

Lockdowns began.

The next two years were a mess of masks, lockdowns, “five-a-house” rules, people losing it online, and more. Worldwide, Covid also helped signify the start of rapidly escalating levels of anxiety and depression as everyone was stuck at home.

Some went so far as to suggest that Covid had been the devil’s plan, and if that was the case then it looked like he was winning.

Covid was an obstacle.

It was a pandemic that had the potential to stop Christians from spreading Jesus’ message. But it failed. As dark as things were, light still shone.

Churches – mine included – switched to online sermons, and, inexplicably, random acts of kindness began rippling through communities. With everyone stuck at home, there was ample time to help those in need.

While it wasn’t fun, Covid by no means utterly confined us. People began to see that, in a time when the world was in uproar, Christians still managed to find peace.

Jesus used lockdowns for good.

“How could anything about Covid be good?” Well, for one, we learned what society is like when our only vent is social media… We also learned that we humans crave connection with others and that isolation isn’t good for us.

I can say this now that we’re out of Covid, but back then, it wasn’t easy. At the time, the world felt like it had collapsed.

Yet in the darkness of it all, Jesus’ light shone all the brighter. His love was revealed to the entire world in our hardest times, thanks to the acts of His followers. While everyone was panicking, we Christians knew Who we’d put our faith in. We had Someone we could trust.

Struggles into Successes.

If there’s one thing Covid did give us, it was time. Time to pursue the things we enjoyed. Time to build relationships with our families. Time to grow closer to Jesus. So even though it wasn’t fun (not at all), I hope when you look back, you can see that Covid wasn’t the end-of-the-universe monster we made it out to be.

Now that Covid is behind us, I also dearly hope that we can remember the good parts about having more time. Hopefully, we can keep that in mind as we’re all so tempted to fill our schedules with as much as possible. It’s not bad to be busy, but there is a point where we should realize there are more important things than just doing as much as we can in a day.

What the devil tried to use for his own gain we used for good. Because nothing can ever stop Jesus’ message from spreading – not some virus, not someone on the internet, and not anything the devil throws at us.

Nothing can stop His message.

Matthew 24:35 (NIV) says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away.”

As a result of the virus, many people came to see that even when the world is going crazy, Jesus loves them and is there for them. They realized that the only true peace comes from Him.

As James 1:2-4 (NIV) says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

(I am still glad things have returned to normal though.)

God turns our trauma into triumph.