A police officer at home on quarantine and struggling with fear and anxiety that he might have contracted COVID-19 took his spiritual questions to the internet and found answers that set his life on a new course.
David (name changed), who has been a police officer for 20 years, was feeling unwell and feared he might have been infected with the novel coronavirus, from which more than 308,000 people have died around the world.
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David (name changed), who has been a police officer for 20 years, was feeling unwell and feared he might have been infected with the novel coronavirus, from which more than 308,000 people have died around the world.
Struggling with fear and anxiety, David came across a website operated by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s online ministry, Search for Jesus, where he clicked to chat with a volunteer, the ministry reported earlier this week.
“I went into Google, and I asked Siri, ‘How can I get saved?’ And your page popped up,” David typed, chatting with Gloria, a trained volunteer at the BGEA’s Search for Jesus.
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“I’m struggling with faith, and with everything going on … even more so,” David typed.
Gloria, his chat coach, asked him a simple question: “Where do you look for peace in uncertain times?”
David answered that he looked within himself.
“I can understand that,” Gloria said. “The catch with that, though, is that our inner selves can be really disturbed by what we see and hear. That can lead to anxiety, as you know.”
Gloria talked about how it’s possible to have peace with God through Jesus.
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“I haven’t had a relationship with God in so long,” David said, explaining that he usually thought living a righteous life was enough to keep him in good standing with God. Then he started feeling sick and got tested for COVID-19. He was waiting for results and feeling anxious. Living a good life no longer seemed adequate.
“I’m not ready to go yet,” David typed. “I’m only 48. … I still feel I have things left to do.”
Gloria reassured him that he could have peace in this life and the next and asked if he wanted to talk about how.
“Not if it’s a sales pitch,” David responded. But a minute later, the wall he had built began to come down.
“I’m so lost,” he said. “And very scared.”
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“Those are important words: ‘I’m so lost,’” Gloria responded. “You have already taken the first step towards God. You know that you have a problem. It sounds like you have been figuring out that your way is not the best.”
When Gloria shared the Gospel with David, he initially seemed reluctant, as he thought about the wages of sin being death. But when he read John 3:16, the verse seemed familiar as he had seen it on signs people held at football games. Now the words were personal: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
He said he prayed the prayer he found on the site, asking Jesus to be his Savior.
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Through the two-week quarantine, BGEA says, God gave David “a gift he hadn’t been looking for—the gift of time. The Lord had once again used a temporary crisis to lead one of His children to eternal life. In this time of uncertainty, it’s one more reason to believe God’s Word is always true.”
