Is God Bigger than the Coronavirus?
By: Meghan Newkirk
Years ago, when my youngest was still a baby, I went through exposure therapy for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Exposure therapy can be an effective way for OCD patients to learn that the world will not fall apart when our fears are faced head on.
For the therapy, I was exposed to specific situations that brought me great anxiety. The exposures started small and gradually grew in difficulty, which ultimately diminished my fear. It is an exhausting process that takes tons of time and mental energy.
OCD made me paralyzed by germs of all shapes, sizes, and varieties. The dreaded grocery store was one of the greatest fears for me. In my mind, grocery carts were covered in a thick layer of vicious germs that would contaminate my hands, my food, and worst of all, my child. I couldn’t bear to put Betsy in the cart even though she would cry with desire for a ride. So I never got a cart. Instead, I would fill the undercarriage of the stroller full of food. My intention was to protect my family from harmful germs, but the OCD turned that desire into a controlling impulse. I was afraid that my kids would adopt my fear of carts and germs, but my need to keep them uncontaminated was too powerful to overthrow.
My therapist began my exposure therapy with the grocery store. I was instructed to go to the store, put my thumb-sucking toddler in the cart after wiping off the handle, and proceed with my shopping. She told me to expect feelings of anxiety and panic, but I had to stay with those anxious feelings, and I could only leave the store when the feelings had decreased by half. Basically, I was supposed to shop with my kids while having a panic attack and couldn’t leave until it was mostly over. It was as fun as it sounds.
I entered Whole Foods armed with waning determination. My daughter was unaware of my angst, her happy nature interrupting my overthinking about what I was to confront. I followed my therapist’s directions; I wiped the cart handle and proceeded to place my precious daughter into the seat. The panic attack started at once in my gut with slight feelings of regret. Then sweat beaded in my armpits as my toddler instinctively placed her thumb back into her mouth after touching the cart handle. I cringed as the imaginary germ monsters began spreading all over both of us.
I took a deep breath and began shopping in the produce section. My anxiety reached its peak in the dairy aisle when I was almost done getting what I needed. I never fled the scene, but I pressed on waiting for the panic level to fall. I prayed, mostly flare prayers of desperation for God to meet me in the awful. I had a starving need to feel God in those moments when everything felt out of control.
When I finally made my way back to the safety of the car, I sat in the front seat panting hard in the same way I panted after I ran a few miles. I sanitized our hands, not once but twice, before calming myself enough to drive home. Once I’d left, the fear diminished every minute that passed. I was doing it! I was facing the panic and pushing through it.
Fast forward four years to the COVID-10 era…
Covid-19 is currently making every one of us feel challenged, scared, and mentally exhausted in the same way OCD does to its sufferers. Seeing people at the store wearing masks and gloves jolts me back to that old familiar mental space that haunts me. The fear and anxiety that everyone in the world is facing today is a small taste of the reality that I’ve experienced most of my life— fear of impending doom. If you’ve ever wondered what someone with OCD feels like, this is it.
Ironically, it is a bizarre feeling to be publicly advised to perform in excess many of the things I worked so hard not to overdo. People are wiping off their individual groceries, washing their hands raw, and refusing to touch cart handles — even clean ones. It is even commonplace to opt out of cooking food for someone else. Granted, these are all necessary precautions today, however, there are people who feel this same level of panic every single day of their lives, deadly pandemic or not.
The truth that I learned the hard way is that God is faithful, even concerning germ contamination. God is not surprised by how germs behave or what they do because He created them. He also created our bodies to interact with germs and we need to rest on his promises that He will always be with us, even when our bodies face turmoil.
God is constantly using my OCD to grow me, stretch me, and lead me in the direction of Christ. He blesses me with helpful tools that guide me to better mental health, such as medication, therapy, and his Word. God promises to be with us through anything we face, no matter how difficult. This, dear friends, is a wonderful promise to remember and also an easy promise to forget. We need to deeply breathe in his promises, let them steep into our souls, and give us life.
As we trudge warily through quarantining, family confinement, chronically messy homes, homeschooling our kids, fear-laden grocery trips, and media frenzy we can rest safely in Jesus. He will enable us to work through the overwhelming panic attack that is Covid-19. He will provide us with the necessary tools to help us get through it all, and most importantly, He gives us Himself. He hears our prayers and will not leave us alone.
When life gets back to normal (and it will), and everyone is back to touching cart handles with no increased heart rate, remember that there are people (people you know and love), who will continue to battle a deep fear of germs. Maybe God will put someone like that in your life and after this experience, you will be able identify with their fears a little better. My prayer is that we will take those future interactions as opportunities to remind our friends with OCD and ourselves that God will never leave us because He loved us enough to send his son to die for us.
This too shall pass, so let’s tell ourselves (and our kids), that germs don’t win. God does.