Coronavirus? I’m not worried about that!
By: Missionary Team
Well, let me take you all back to everyone’s favorite year, the glorious, the untouchable 2020! At the start of March, I had my spring break from college looming over the horizon, and I was so excited to take a vacation to visit my friends and escape what had been a pretty lonely and depressing semester. After I bought my train ticket to my friends’ house and packed my bags, I set off to have a solid week of relaxation and fun. My mindset going into this break was to forget about school, responsibilities, news, and everything else going on in the world. Now trying to drown everything out in the world made me oblivious to the rumors and threat of the supposed “Coronavirus” quickly spreading across the world.
Shortly after I got to my friends’ house, we wasted no time, immediately packing up our stuff to go on a road trip to places like Springfield, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri. We spent our time sightseeing and goofing around without a care in the world of how quickly we would lose being able to go out in public without worrying about masks, quarantine, social distancing, and the rest of the Covid-19 portfolio. After that trip, I returned to my friends’ house for the following week, continuing to do much of the same - with the inclusion of lots of binge watching, gaming, and junk food consuming. It seemed that every day, one of my friends’ older brothers would come home from his grocery job telling us how people were starting to freak out more and more over Covid-19, to which we laughed and shrugged off as people “overreacting”.
Soon, all of the fun and games came to a crashing end, and after an awesome trip of sightseeing with my friends in Chicago, the bombshell that people were starting to be put in quarantine, and that most stores and shops were closing, really woke us all up to the true threat of this virus. Right as my break was ending, I got an email, telling me that my college had extended my break to adjust to online classes, which was a miracle considering how my family was having a hard time of finding a good option to pick me up.
After I came back home from my trip, I was thrown into being quarantined with my family for the next few months, and it was only two days after getting home that I got really sick. Now my family had been dealing with influenza while I was gone, and the first conclusion was that I had it too. However, there was another possibility that I had Covid-19, since I did not have enough time to contract influenza from my family so quickly. Whatever the case was, I felt so awful that I was bedridden for a week and was paralyzed in fear that I had this supposedly incurable, world-ending virus that everyone was talking about.
After my recovery, I was able to get a clear view of how my world got turned upside down so fast. This living without a care in the world, coming tumbling down by getting more sick than I ever had in my life, made me realize that I was living life foolishly and going through the motions in my faith. Coming so close with the fear of dying had never happened to me before, and it slowly started to get me to reexamine myself and my relationship with God. And while I was looking for ways to deepen my faith, I was given the opportunity to become a missionary for Hard As Nails. If it was not for my recent revelation, I would have not even had considered the idea of becoming a missionary, which ultimately became one that ended up saving my faith life!
Many people bash on the inconvenience of the Covid-19 pandemic, and while I can agree with most of it, I would have to say that there are some good things that this virus caused. It allowed me to do things like spending more time with my family than I have in years. But most importantly, it opened up the doors to an increase in my faith. And now, I do not believe that I am the only one who has been given the opportunity to grow in their faith during this pandemic. So, if you have a wild story like mine, and think that God is using this pandemic to help you grow closer to Him, do not waste any time and answer His call.
