Recently Northstar member Bethany Teague created a video for her company titled #InItTogether. After we saw it, we asked her to write a blog about her experience:
Unprecedented, historic, strange.
If I had a roll of toilet paper for every time I’ve heard these words since March 1, I could drink milk for life without a care.
And as much as these adjectives are painfully accurate to describe COVID-19 days, here’s the other side of the coin: everything has changed, but it also hasn’t at all.
The COVID Connection Project
The “COVID Connection” project was originally meant to be an honest snapshot of how different life has become inside coronavirus confines. It was a daunting task for me and my Click & Pledge team as filmmakers – create a moving, human interest video without picking up a camera or having face-to-face human interaction.
How am I to know what’s going on out there if I can’t leave my living room? Is life even happening right now?
I quickly collided with an immovable reality. No matter what, we remain people.
We remain people.
Life is still very much happening right now. It’s happening on the other side of the planet, and it’s happening in our own mirrors. For the Northstar family, you will see some familiar faces in this piece. That’s because I didn’t have to look very far for the profound, for the mundane, the highs, the lows – everything that daily writes our stories regardless of the backdrop.
As the recordings that compose “COVID Connection” started pouring in from folks graciously allowing a glimpse into their worlds, my team and I found exactly what we were looking for. Life.
This pandemic has touched all of us. It has changed us. It has disrupted us, and even killed some of us.
But no matter what your experience has been, I submit to you that COVID-19 is not subtracting from but rather magnifying all the grit, fragility, resilience, pain, joy, life and death that make us the sacred, fallen image-bearers that we are.
I encourage us all to look closely enough into the unfamiliar to see what we have always known. Our gift. Our curse. What a beautiful, broken blessing it is to be human.
We truly are #InItTogether.