Advent and World AIDS Day - thoughts

Advent is a season of waiting for what we think we know and still maintaining an element of surprise and relief when it arrives. Those of us who work out our faith in the shadow of the resurrection have it pretty easy. We have a written record of this beautiful story of a God who puts on flesh as an act of love and then lets soldiers rip the wrapping at the crucifixion. Our waiting is tempered by a kind of knowing that sometimes gets in the way. It's not hard to wait for the gift that you know is coming...especially when all of our Christian rituals remind us that the One shows up year after year - whether there is a live baby or a chubby cheeked plastic doll in the manger scene in the annual Christmas pageant. We do all of our shopping and prepping because we know that there is a deadline on our calendar that reminds us that what we have waited for is surely going to appear. I wonder how our lives would change if we lived as those who can only wait with the hope that someday, the Messiah will come and save them...from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Today is World AIDS day. I don't know anyone whose life has not been touched by the ravages of this disease...if only tangentially. Today, I pray with those who are waiting for a Savior to make them well. Those who suffer with AIDS know what it is to wait for something (the cure) that seems possible yet proves impossible in it's failure to appear. It's hard to believe that there isn't enough brain power to find a cure. It's hard to believe that there isn't enough money being poured into research to find a cure. It is hard to believe that no one is angry enough to demand that our government agencies check their/our priorities and find ways to put the quality of human lives ahead of egocentric pissing games. (I'll stop here because I feel a rant coming on and that's not my intent today.) I'm simply saying that in a world of inventions, conventions and small God-made-but-man-attributed-miracles...it seems like there just has to be a cure for the disease or at least some cure for the apathy that some of us show towards those who suffer. This is not the more excellent way.

There is a quote on the AIDS quilt that reads, "We're both dying, you and me. The difference is that I know it, and you don't." As I wait for the Savior to be born in a manger yet again, I also wait for a well-equipped world to find a cure for AIDS. I pray for my own heart to be mindful that no one dies from AIDS. People who have AIDS die from the same things that people who don't have AIDS die from...they just die sooner. I pray that I would put the need for human healing in a position to eradicate my need to judge, pre-suppose and feel superior because this physical suffering is not my particular physical suffering. I pray that as we enter this season of anticipation and waiting for the One who was, and is, and is to come that we would remember those who wait...for a cure and perhaps this year, we might offer them our space in line as we wait...

Shalom