Dealing with Losses

I mentioned last week that my cat died. I was talking to a relative about that this past week, and we got reminiscing about his son, who died before the age of thirty. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t know that today was world AIDS day. I think we were just talking about losses that we had felt. This was someone that I had known practically my whole life.

When I found out that he had AIDS, I was somewhat conflicted. I was a new Christian, and of course I had heard generalities about how homosexuality is an abomination, and about how AIDS is God’s punishment for sin. Still, this is a relative; someone close to me. I didn’t know how to react; I had no idea how I was supposed to react. You may have heard the expression, “Love the sinner, but hate the sin.” I wasn’t sure how contagious AIDS really was; I don’t think anyone truly did at the time, but I felt an assurance from God that I could spend time with this person much as I had before, and I wouldn’t get sick. I tried to share the love of God with him, and talk to him about forgiveness, but he heard too much about how his disease was retribution for his sins.

To be honest, I think the idea that God created AIDS specifically to deal with evil doers is absurd. If God wanted to kill off sinners, He spoke the world into existence; He could just as easily speak those people out of existence. Granted, He has used disease to get people’s attention before, but did you ever notice that the ten plagues in Egypt only affected the Egyptians, not the Israelites? If God was going to use a disease to wipe out one or two groups of sinners, He could create a virus that would be extremely selective.

I’m afraid that when it comes to cases like this, too many of us are afraid of what might happen if they associate with “those people.” Jesus took a lot of heat from the Pharisees for the type of people He hung out with, but He understood that God so loved the world, in other words, God loves everybody. God doesn’t love one group of people because they are obedient, and then hate some other group of people because they have committed some unpardonable sin. We all sin. Sometimes the worst sin is thinking that you are better than somebody else simply because you’ve managed to avoid the sin that ensnared them.

Sometimes we have to undo the damage done by those that have come before us. The Bible says that the Word of God is a two-edged sword; it’s capable of doing a lot of damage, but it can also be used, in the hands of one who is skilled in its use, as a scalpel. The really unfortunate thing is when a situation arises when it should be used delicately, and the person using it starts swinging it like a machete. That’s hard to clean up.

I guess the bottom line is, AIDS victims are exactly that: victims. We have no business judging how they got the disease (if they contracted through sinful actions, that it between them and God). We can minister to them, as long as we take reasonable precautions for not spreading the disease. To be honest, it sort of seems like AIDS today is a lot like leprosy in Biblical times. Nobody wanted to associate with lepers then, because they weren’t ‘clean,’ but Jesus healed a lot of them. God loved them then, and He loves people with socially awkward diseases now.