Dear Covid-19,

Dear Covid-19,

I could never have imagined someone like you to exist. I’ve never actually met you, but you’ve become so popular that I already know what seems to be everything there is to know about you. You may not always be named, yet somehow you’ve hovered over every one of my conversations lately. 

In a matter of days you’ve stolen so much from me. The opportunity to freely surround myself with the people I love. The hope I had of doing all the “senior things” that I watched all the people I’ve looked up to for years enjoy as they celebrated walking through their final months of high school. You have stolen the dream moment I’ve always pictured. The one where I walk on stage to get handed my diploma while being cheered on by the people who chose to love me through the 17 years of tough growing and hard work that got me there. 

The solidity of my entire next year’s plan has completely crumpled at your fingertips. I’ve watched all my efforts in the last eight months to fundraise the $16,000 that I need for the World Race turn into efforts for something that could so very easily not happen at all. In a matter of days, you have swallowed up so much certainty in my life that I didn’t even realize i was leaning on until I fell. 

What’s worse is the thought that you now threaten the safety of my own Mama every time she walks through the hospital doors to care for the people that are in such desperate need of it. 

I’ve had more tears fall down my cheeks in the past week than I have had in months. Tears of fear, desperation, confusion, loneliness, and anger that you’ve so widely opened up a doorway for. You didn’t seem to forget the ”welcome“ mat either. 

Every aspect of my life has been utterly changed by you, but it would be shameful and grossly selfish of me to focus this on myself. Despite these setbacks I am outrageously blessed; although I am hurting, there is a world of people you’ve allowed a much deeper and piercing pain. 

Covid-19, you’ve unjustly and unexpectedly taken jobs from people who were living paycheck by paycheck to simply provide the basic necessities for their families. 

As you continue to audaciously infect people, issued lockdowns are causing children to be trapped in homes with abusive adults. No longer is school or a friends house or the coffee shop across the street an escape option. In fact, social distancing has left only a reminiscent hope of anyone finding out about their desperate situations.

Kids who relied on school for their only meal of the day are stuck at home for weeks with empty pantries and empty bellies. 

You’ve now grasped people in third world countries, like Haiti, that just barely had a healthcare system to start with. People living so far below the poverty line don’t even have the capabilities to provide for the day to day things, much less the medical help they would need to survive your deathly grip. 

And that leads me to the part that has caused the hate for you to dwell so deep in me. You are taking lives. Thousands of them. Young and old and everywhere in between are dying at your entanglement. But they aren’t just dying, they are forced to take their last breath in a stale hospital bed, hooked to machines that gave no cure, surrounded only by people that are disguised as masked aliens. Not only stripped of life but stripped of any fortuity of being surrounded by the people they love. All simply out of the fear that you could grip them too. The word death these days not only bears the weight of sadness, but of empty loneliness.

Covid-19, you have waged a war with the world; one with few weapons. Silently, you invade body after body with footsteps to quiet for the human ears to hear. Your destructive hands are ripping apart lives, leaving us desperate for defense tactics. 

But,

your story is not over.

There is someone you could never take away.

There is someone who already knows your path to defeat. 

There is someone with grace deeper than any destruction you could ever cause.

Let me introduce you to my God. 

Covid-19, we could lose everything because of your selfish hands, but as long as God is with us, we lack absolutely nothing.

The presence of the disaster you are protruding into this world does not mean the absence of His grace and love and peace. In fact, those things are far more contagious than you will ever be. 

You may be winning a few battles, but Abba wins every war.

You look like you are in control, but I know that thought is a lie that my eyes are feeding me because the Creator always reigns over His creation. 

My God is the one that continues to paint the skies night after night to remind us that just as he is faithful in the small things, He remains faithful in the big things.

You will fade away but He remains the Eternal King. 

He has positioned the disaster surrounding us to defeat the disaster of pride inside of us because God doesn’t waste pain. 

Despite the isolation you have caused, He has positioned a revival of empathy. No longer is there room for petty arguments and political division; we are united under the same desperation. Shared compassion has begun to stitch together our broken pieces. 

You have ripped away my certainty and that empty void has finally left room for my faith to grow. 

You thought you had cut everything out of my life bringing me joy, but you have only cut out every distraction keeping me from sitting in the presence of the Lord. And the Lord is my joy. 

You might have taken jobs, school, and every other commitment under the sun, but my God is using these days to give us rest. He is teaching His people the importance of days filled with nothing but the obligation to find out more of who He is by discovering the passions He has uniquely graced each one of us with.  

You might have thought you won when +550 missionaries unexpectedly had to be brought back home to America, but Abba so intentionally brought back vessels of His truth and peace to a place saturated with chaos and desperation. I was reminded the other day when reading Exodus that while the Israelites were suffering over 100 years of slave oppression in Egypt, it was written, “but the more the pharaoh afflicted them, the more they multiplied and spread” (Exodus 1:12). And just as no amount of affliction could defeat God’s purpose of growing the Israelites into a large nation, no amount of affliction will defeat God’s purpose of bringing His glory to every nation. 

In the circumstances you have created, my God is raising up an army of people who can sing, “It is well with my soul,” no matter what they are fighting against.

Covid-19, if nothing else, I’m here to remind you that we serve a Heavenly Father who sent His own son to bear an agonizing death on the cross that lead to the darkest three days this world will ever see; yet, during those darkest days, He made way for His glory as death turned into resurrection and the forever defeat of sins grip on human hearts. 

For resurrection to be possible, death had to be endured. So as God is allowing you to bring so much death into this world, killing everything from our daily routines to people who we hold so close, the question that remains heavy on my heart is what is God trying to resurrect in us? 

Covid-19, we refuse to miss the miracle in the making.  

From Yours Truly, 

Kenzi Sandberg <3