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Twelve million African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS.
It's hard to visualize a number like "12 million", so imagine
this instead. Take an imaginary tour around the Great Plains states.
Visualize Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma.
Imagine that there is not a single child in the entire region who hasn't lost a parent to AIDS. Imagine that every single child from Chicago to Boulder to Minneapolis to Oklahoma City has lost their father or their mother or both. That's what "12 million children" means.
There is an immense crisis in the world. Where does helping the miserable and the helpless fall in the priorities of Jesus' people? If you go around churches and Christian circles and listen to what's being discussed and watch what's being done - what will that say about our priorities and our passion? What do we truly care about?
He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.
- Deut 10:18
Many transgendered people are told that our gender questions are a Big Fat Issue. Sometimes we're told that suppressing our transgendered feelings them should occupy all our attention and efforts. Or we can get into the "transgendered ghetto" where it seems like pursuing our gender hopes and needs should occupy all our attention and efforts.
Out in the rest of the Christian church - in the U.S., anyway - we have plenty that we talk about and argue about and write to Congress about. I'm just afraid that our sense of proportion is totally lost, that our urgency and intensity is almost completely devoted to other matters. Don't bother us with talk about orphans. We have Family Values and Moral Issues to be concerned about.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus doesn't say why the priest and the Levite pass by the victim without acting to help. Maybe they were too busy arguing about whose worship of God was more righteous, or whether some political development was just or unholy. Maybe they were hurrying away to deal with some theological crisis. Maybe there was some heretical teaching somewhere, and their zeal for correctness before God drove them onward to deal with important religious matters.
Of course, most of the time, you could trace a case of AIDS back to somebody's bad decisions. Some victims had non-monogomous sex. Some women with AIDS were married to men who had sex outside their marriage. Some children got HIV in the womb from their mothers. Sometimes it was spread by intraveneous drug abuse. Whatever. It's a shame. It cries out for education to warn people not to act this way.
It has nothing to do with deciding whether to help the suffering.
If Jesus Christ had limited his mercy to those who hadn't done some wrong to make them unworthy, he could have spared himself a filthy stable birthplace and a nasty crucifiction. He could have stayed pristine and proud in his Heaven and left all of us on our earth-made-Hell. He didn't. And if his example means anything to me, I can't act that way either.
He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me? declares the Lord.
(Jeremiah 22:16 NIV)Christ's peace,
- Jade