Have you questioned what your life would be like if COVID-19 hadn’t happened?
I don’t know about you, but living through the pandemic required a lot of blind faith.
As most of us are, I am still trying to regroup after the heavy impact of the pandemic. The pandemic made me do a 180 with my life plans. Even though where I am is not where I planned to be, God has shown me the silver linings in where I have ended up.
As human beings, fear comes naturally to us. It is a natural instinct. It can be useful for survival. On the other hand, I would say that faith does not come so naturally to us. In my life, I have found that I have to actively choose faith, and I think there are a lot of other people out there that will agree with me on that.
Fear of faith
Faith can be defined as having complete trust in someone or something. The Bible defines faith as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” (Hebrews 11:1). However, depending on what cannot be seen can be unnerving. We want to be able to see first and then believe. But faith means trusting God even when you can’t see. That’s hard. That’s unsettling.
Right at the start of 2020, before COVID-19 impacted the US, I was in a pretty dark mental state. I was entertaining superficial relationships and feeding my spirit with junk while trying to seek help. Dealing with depression is hard. Depressive attacks can come out of nowhere, and crash over you like a tidal wave. Depression is unsettling. However, at that time contemplating faith was even more unsettling to me. For those who are new to faith or who are maybe trying to rekindle a faith that was burned out, faith can be a sensitive topic. As a skeptic myself, I understand the difficulty of the fluctuating seasons of disbelief and belief.
I have found a lot of the times when I put my faith in God, God doesn’t actually take me out of my uncomfortable situations. In fact, God often leaves me in those situations but equips me to persevere through them. In those times I also found a lot of intimate sweet moments with God. In those moments, God blessed me with hope and good people.
In that dark time in my life when I so desperately wanted to escape my anxious thoughts and toxic environment, God didn’t show me a way out. Instead God gave me the tools necessary to fight my depression in a healthy way. God did not take me out of my unsettling circumstances. Instead I was made stronger through them.
Moving from fear to faith
At that time in my life my faith in God was little to none. I was scared to believe in a God who could turn my life upside down overnight. I was scared to believe that there might be a higher power out there that was watching me. But the scariest thing was believing in something my physical eyes could not see. Even though I was scared of faith, I made an attempt. Even though I did not fully believe or know what to believe, I still tried to. And through my miniscule attempt to believe in God and Jesus, I found hope, a stronger faith, and good people.
Referring back to that question, “What would your life look like if COVID-19 never happened?” I don’t know if I would be as happy with my life and with my faith. Before the pandemic I was always running away from my insecurities and issues. I was putting on a façade of happiness. But in fact, I was hurting deep down, and hardly knew that myself.
However, God knew that, and it was God that reached down into my mess, and redirected me into a better future. Now when I think about having faith in God it isn’t so unsettling anymore. In fact, it is what I put my trust in everyday, and it is why I'm so thankful for where I am now.
