World AIDS Day 2008

Monday, 12.1.08, is World AIDS Day. I can't say that I've ever been aware of this day before but I certainly am this year. For several reasons.

For one - I've become a member of the AIDS Awareness Task Force at church. I started volunteering at 5p21 and quickly got initiated into the task force. I'm enjoying it and glad to be helping raise awareness of yet another disease that needs to be cured. I cut out red ribbon stickers. I pass out teddy bears. I encourage people to buy gifts for the kids at the clinic.

For another reason - today our church celebrated World AIDS Day and had my friend Nancy, who's HIV positive, as a speaker. She told us about her every day struggles with the disease, about not knowing if her son would be born HIV positive (he wasn't), about her life and her faith. Just hearing her, as with most disease survivors and fighters, was encouraging and amazingly hopeful. At the end of the service we heard the names of people read who've died of AIDS recently. What a moving experience.

Even more so because I was sitting next to Joe. I met Joe on Thursday at Thanksgiving. He's living with AIDS and is currently under hospice care. To sit there, to put a face with the disease, was truly humbling. And as he cried, and I took his hand, I wondered about these diseases, all of them, that take our loved ones. I wondered why God allows them. I wondered where He was in all of this. And then I realized, as I looked around. As I looked at the tears on people's cheeks, as I looked at the teddy bears we'd been charged with loving for the past month so they can be given to patients this week, as I looked at the love in the room, I realized. I realized I shouldn't waste my energy on wondering why but loving, caring, and sharing. So I squeezed Joe's hand a little harder and I thanked God for putting me in this place at this exact time. To love. To be loved.