Quarantined man fearful he'll test positive for COVID-19 asks Siri: 'How can I get saved?'
A police officer at home on quarantine and struggling with fear and anxiety that he might have contracted COVID-19 asked Siri, “How can I get saved?” And the website of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association propped up, and he soon prayed to ask Jesus to be his Savior.
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.
“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, the ministry reported earlier this week.
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“I’m struggling with faith, and with everything going on … even more so,” David wrote. “Where do you look for peace in uncertain times?” Gloria asked. From within himself, he responded.
“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.”
David thought he needed to live righteously to have a good standing with God. But after he felt sick and got tested, he felt anxious as he waited for results. He felt inadequate. “I’m not ready to go yet. I’m only 48. … I still feel I have things left to do,” he wrote to Gloria.
“I’m so lost. And very scared,” he said. “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.
“He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore!” the Rev. Franklin Graham, who heads BGEA, wrote on Facebook about David.
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.”
