Written By: Katie Schupp

Approaching the year 2020, I heard many conversations and plays-on-words that 2020 will give perfect vision and will be the year of clarity… “The best is yet to come...” I read. 

My friends planned big plans for this year and I planned big plans for this year. 

I held tightly onto the aspirations and goals that I have placed on this year, but still, I strove to surrender it to God and fully abide in Him and His plans for my life.

I had thought I could have both... I think many of us fall into the same boat of trying to have both. 

As 2020 began, gyms were full, the produce aisles in the grocery stores were packed, church seats were occupied, and time was devoted to hobbies that now seem forever stamped with the, “Maybe someday” label.  

2020 was going to be it. 

I began the Spring Semester of my third year of college, and before I looked up from my books, it was February. Everything changed in February. 

I remember faintly hearing about a virus from China that seemed to get some headlines. Sad for them, I thought but did not have any personal effect on my life as a college student in Chicago. 

But, by the second week of spring break, the virus hit the country with full-force. Fast-forward to a couple more days, and I open my email to find I would not be returning to campus for the semester. My plans for 2020 had been turned completely around. I would be moving back home months early to finish school online. Students around the world would be attending school from home. Okay 2020, what’s going on?

With the separation and social distancing came the distancing of peoples. Not a six-foot CDC mandated distancing but a division. 

The media told me I am selfish if I did not stay home, but it also told me I did not have a backbone if I did stay home, and I was handing over my freedom.

The world divided. 

People divided physically and in their hearts as hatred grew toward the other party. The body of Christ could no longer participate in community in the way it always had and, when people stopped gathering, we took that opportunity to communicate behind the safety net of a screen, leading to even more division. 

After months of isolation and saturation in the media as screen-time skyrocketed in the lives of Americans under the stay-at-home order, just when things were beginning to open up, the world was shaken with the death of two black men who lost their lives to senseless, volatile hatred in the name of racism. Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. I thought these murders, so firmly and clearly evil, would bring the country together to fight racism… but I was wrong. Instead, it created an even stronger division and stigma of hatred.

Halfway through 2020, my heart aches for unity against evil and oppression.

Over these past couple of weeks, I found myself asking several times a day, “What would Jesus do?”... not in the early 2000s way with the “WWJD” merch, but as a deep theological question. Curious about the thoughts of my Savior and King I follow and build my life around... My Savior, my King, my Friend, my Father... 

The One who performs miracles, fights for the oppressed, and submits respectfully to the government. 

The One who intentionally went against societal norms to love the marginalized individuals… 

 I want to know what HE would do in the catastrophe of a year that 2020 is.

Never in my life have I asked this question so often.

As a college student in my early twenties, I don’t know much. 

The world is telling me to take a stance on every article and issue the media throws at me- to take a stance, to be loud about it, and to hate anyone who opposes my beliefs. 

While I don't know much here’s what I do know: as a believer and follower of Jesus my stance never has to change; we can anchor to the fact that there is an unstoppable, overwhelming love that God has for his people and those He created... those made in His image. Through that love that He has so graciously poured onto His people, we are compelled to allow that love to overflow from within us onto those who desperately ache to find hope. Every action and every word I say should be a direct reflection of His perfect love for hurting people. I am called to be a vessel of hope and love in a world that seems to be lacking both.

I embrace that truth with absolute gratitude that my stance will never change and that this truth applies to every catastrophe the world has seen and will see in the future. 

This anomaly of love, unknown to the world, revealed to us strongly in such a time as this, revealed to us now in the chaos, forces me to ask myself... What if 2020 is the year of clarity? What if this is what we’ve been waiting for? 

What if this is it…such a time as this, such a time that is so uneasy, rocky, alarming and appalling that we must grow. 

A year that awakens us from complacency and apathy in which we have been so comfortably living. What if the division we’re experiencing is an awakening to the sin in our hearts we did not before notice? 

What if we stopped waiting for 2020 to be over, but instead embraced it, banding together realizing this may be the crux of a turning point in history and our lives individually?

Lord, help us to seek justice and love Your people better.