HIV Is Incurable, So Don't Stop Caring by Kay Warren

I am now more than a month away from Africa and I am finding myself feeling more distant from Zambia, more immersed in American culture, and sometimes wondering if maybe it's time to take a break on all this poverty, this AIDS, this Least stuff...after all we've done more than almost anyone I know haven't we? And some days I want to just enjoy things here without feeling conflicted all the time...why do I wonder what my African friends would think when I walk into our new church building for the first time? why do I get a little squeamish walking into the Apple store literally humming with everyone pulling gadgets off the shelf? why do I fell guilty worrying about the stock market and my investments here when a US dollar is worth 100 billion dollars in Zimbabwe? And then Kay Warren reminds me of what is true in my life and what causes the discomfort and concern even when I am thousands of miles from Kakolo Village...it is simply that I am on a journey of responding to AIDS, to the needs of others, to living biblically with my resources, of caring when it seems others might be losing interest because there are still incredible needs, AIDS is still real, and the call of Jesus on my life in relationship to the needy here and in Africa simply will not and must not lessen or go away till my days on earth end here...may we have the courage and faith to be in it for the long haul and not stop caring today and tomorrow and next year and for a lifetime...

Recent research has changed the AIDS headlines, but that shouldn't matter to the church.

At first glance, a comment this week from the head of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization seems to indicate that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is all but over. In an interview with London's Independent, Dr. Kevin De Cock said, "There will be no generalized epidemic of AIDS in the heterosexual population outside Africa."

Coming on the heels of the UNAIDS report in November 2007 that revised the estimates of those infected with HIV downward from 40 million to 33 million, one could conclude that HIV is no longer a humanitarian crisis.

Not so. As De Cock goes on to say, "AIDS still remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public health. It is an acute infection, but a chronic disease. It is for the very, very long haul. People are backing off, saying it is taking care of itself. It is not."

To me, the larger questions are not about numbers or categories — how many people are infected, or whether more homosexuals or heterosexuals are likely to become infected. The reasons I became an advocate for people with HIV six years ago are just as valid as they were then. Not much has changed.

I can think of several compelling reasons why the church of Jesus Christ must care about people with HIV and AIDS whether they're straight, gay, old, young, victim, victimizer, African, Asian, Indian, Latino, or Caucasian. The categories are irrelevant to our call to care.

The most important reason is for the church to care is that it is completely unexpected. When was the last time the church cared about a sexually transmitted disease? Historically, we haven't done a very good job of teaching healthy sex and sexuality, so it isn't surprising that we don't want to talk about HIV and AIDS.

You can't talk about HIV without talking about sex! Because it is a sexually transmitted virus, the stigma is profound. Internationally and in my Southern California backyard, people diagnosed with HIV or AIDS can face divorce, beatings, job loss, rejection, loss of friends, discrimination, and violence. I could fill pages with the tragic stories of men, women, and children who have endured the painful stigma associated with HIV.

Unlike malaria or tuberculosis (which can be cured with $20 worth of medication when caught early enough), HIV is incurable. It is ultimately a fatal disease, ravaging the immune system of the infected person, leaving them vulnerable to opportunistic infections that a normal immune system could deal with.

One piece of good news amid the bad is that HIV is treatable. In the United States and in other developed nations, where life-saving medications are readily available, an HIV positive individual can expect to live a relatively normal life. People in developing nations do not fare so well. Without access to these "wonder drugs," life expectancy after diagnosis can be three to five years.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago, I asked my oncologist how I got cancer. Did I do something wrong? Was it genetics? Should I have eaten more broccoli? He told me he had no idea why I got cancer. HIV is different. We know how it is transmitted. That mystery was solved more than 20 years ago, and in the process, we also learned it is almost 100 percent preventable.

The toll HIV and AIDS exerts does not end with claiming the life of the infected person. Children whose parents die prematurely face a bleak future, easily becoming HIV statistics themselves, thus repeating a vicious cycle of infection and death.

If you knew there was an incurable but preventable and treatable disease that brought shame and stigma, created millions of orphans, decimated families, and jeopardized the hard-won development gains of dozens of the nations of our world, wouldn't you care?

If you're still not sure, reluctant to give your heart and your help to those with HIV and AIDS, take a look at Mark 1:40-42 (NIV). A leper, widely assumed to have secret, unconfessed sin, braved the crushing stigma and fear his illness created to find Jesus. So ashamed of his condition, he approached our Master on his knees, begging to be healed. Jesus could have turned his back on the man, shouted accusations at his sinful state, refused to even speak to him. Instead, the Bible says he was "filled with compassion." He reached out his hand, touched the man, and healed him.

This story never fails to instruct me, to move me. Jesus had the perfect opportunity to ask this man how he became ill, but he didn't. He just helped him. I don't think it's wild speculation to assume that the man's spiritual leprosy was healed that day as well. Jesus models for us how to approach people with the leprosy of our time — HIV and AIDS. As we care for their bodies, care for the orphans and vulnerable children left behind, care for the spiritual wounds that lie hidden deep in the soul, categories and numbers become people.

People Jesus loves. People Jesus died for. People who will never know there is a Savior unless our biblical worldview includes a willingness to ask the larger questions.

Kay Warren, author of Dangerous Surrender, is head of the HIV/AIDS Initiative at Saddleback Church. In late June, she was part of the official U.S. delegation in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, Special Session, on HIV/AIDS.

Standing in Line for an IPhone

This past Saturday morning I drove out to Oakbrook Mall, a place I visit very infrequently, to do something I've not really done before, stand in line for a product that had been hyped beyond belief by Apple and the electronic media machine...I had decided when the new IPhone came out with a lower price I would trade in my 4 year old cell phone and join the Mac world on a deeper level by making it my 40th birthday gift from some family members...

To be honest, spending money on things like an IPhone are fairly torturous for my mind and my worldview...even as I showed Ingrid how cool some of its features were I was struggling with spending my resources in this way...

I headed out to the Apple store and got there about 20 minutes before it was scheduled to open at 9 am...I figured I'd be there an hour, maybe two at the most after missing the hysteria of 3G Friday's release day 24 hours before...there was aline of maybe 100 people ahead of me and within the next hour there were close to 200 behind me...it was a cloudy Saturday morning and I had brought along my new issue of Sports Illustrated to read in line and found myself sending a few last texts and making a couple final phone calls on my soon-to-be-retired phone...and then for some reason I'm still not sure about, perhaps network issues or people asking lots of questions, the line began to move slower and slowere and slower...I called Ingrid and she asked me if I needed food or drink or sunscreen as the clock moved toward noon...

Over the course of the 4 1/2 hours I stood in line to purchase a phone the time and the experience ended up being bizzare, profound, and a fascinating sociological study of American culture...

First of all, I had some truly remarkable and enjoyable conversations...an incredibly bright DuPage county judge and I talked for hours about Africa, global literature, young evangelicals, parenting in this generation, high school and college athletics, the impact of electronic communication, mutual friends, and different approaches to faith and justice as we stood in line for something we both admitted we knew we clearly did not need...and yet this span of time in life allowed us to connect rather deeply without interruption from our busy lives and schedules...

Another guy in line with us told us to just come in with him when he was called first into the store because we were now family members anyways...

Overall, it was fascinating to see who was in line with me:
*A couple who had driven from another state and spent the night to get one
*A guy who had been turned away at 11:30 pm the night before at another Apple store
*Dads buying their junior high daughters a new IPhone
*People who already had phones less than a year now but needed more speed

And as the minutes turned to hours, all around the outdoor mall people's questions and frustrations became more apparent...

As we stood in a line snaking thru the outdoor mall courtyard, one older man rather curtly asked us, "Why in the world would you stand in line for a stupid phone you can get next week?" My new friend and I just kind of shrugged our shoulders and each thought that we are mulling over the same question...

The people in line near us began to lose patience and complain about Apple's slow service, incompetent customer care plan for this day, and the rising humidity and temperatures...and as people began to talk about what a miserable experience, what a waste of time this quest to get the IPhone was now for hundreds here and millions of Americans, something stirred in me and my thoughts began to race to lines in other parts of the world, places where people even at that moment were doing the same physical act for vastly different reasons...

*I had thoughts of my friend Trent's friends in Zimbabwe standing in line for 5 hours for a loaf of bread that costs 10 billion dollars in an economy ravaged by inflation and a nation devastated by an evil dictator
*I had thoughts of some of my Zambian friends standing in line for hours to get tested and then get the results of an HIV test at a rural health clinic
*And I had thoughts of the hundreds of trucks waiting hours thru the night to get across the Botswana border into Zambia and the women willing to sleep with truck drivers bored by frustration and being in a never ending line just so they can fill their stomachs and the swollen bellies of their children with the only way they can gather resources as a woman in an injust and desperate world

That quiet, yet so forceful voice of the Holy Spirit spoke louder than Steve Jobs and left me with a few other questions to bring home in addition to my new phone in the stylish white Apple bag:

#1) Have I been taken by the Apple marketing wave to believe that this is something I need when it might not be helpful to my ministry, family life, and the stewardship of my resources? (I did use it to look up microfinance opportunities at my student leadership team meeting last night!)
#2) What would my friends in Kakolo Village think of the IPhone?
#3) Do I care and pray daily for those in line and need around the world with the interest and concern I have in my new piece of technology?
#4) Does technology make our lives better, richer, and deeper?
#5) And do I chase the "American Dream" harder than the "Kingdom Dream" I've discovered in the Gospels?

To be honest, this whole experience was powerful and quite strange...I am caught once again between...between thinking why I am so conflicted about this when I am a suburban American and why am I buying this crazy item as a globally minded follower of Jesus...and while I definitely find myself wishing some days for no lines and no worries about how to live each day well and right, deep in my soul I know that I am so blessed to know and understand people in lines so different than the one I stood in on a lazy summer Saturday...may I, may you continue to help take them out of their lines as we share God's grace with people near and far from the IPhone's reach...

And I'm hoping I'll remember those in line every time I use my I Phone every day...