Moments of RED

This week I sat at a breakfast table with an amazing young man who told me his father had infected him with HIV when he was 11 months old and then explained that he believed in a God who creates beauty and possibility out of even the ugliest situations and that because of this belief he is using his own experience of discrimination to speak out against the stigma of persons with HIV/AIDS and to empower children and youth who are even today growing up in the midst of an unforgiving and irreconcilable ignorance.

I sat in a forum where a man living with AIDS publicly pleaded with tear filled eyes and a trembling voice for a government official to help the people in his state receive desperately needed funding for life saving medication.

I heard a United Methodist Bishop state that while the United Methodist Church might still be making its mind up about whether or not to minister to people living with HIV/AIDS, Jesus already has. I watched many admirable, humble servants receive beautiful awards for their compassion and commitment in communities of people which the rest of the world so easily forgets.

I heard statistics that I had heard before but even repeated remained difficult to comprehend...each and every time the nameless numbers float around in my mind. I heard plans for resolution, for an AIDS free world, for a church which was willing to stand up and fight for toleration of those living with HIV/AIDS and a church intolerant of waiting for one more person to be infected before they began to continue the work of Jesus.

I heard stories and held hands and sang songs and prayed prayers that in the struggle to combat stigma, apathy, and ignorance, that I might have a place, that my gifts and graces, enthusiasm and education, might find a voice in the chorus of miracle makers...and that this place and this voice might be welcomed in what can sometimes be the coldest and most judgmental of institutions; the church.