The Power To Change The World

When you attend Bible college, or as my dear husband likes to point out a Bible "Institute," rather than your typical liberal arts college or university, you encounter a variety of experiences atypical to your average young adult. Those differentiations in and of themselves could easily constitute another post. For the record, I did wear skirts every day for four years. (Though by my senior year, I exchanged a knee-length black skirt for a longer one.) Another distinction was that each student, in an effort to fulfill the founder D.L. Moody's vision, was required to participate in a practical Christian ministry, affectionately known as a PCM. Looking back at my Moody experience, my involvement in these practical acts indeed helped shape much of the way I think about what it means to preach the gospel without using words. As a junior, I had the privilege of spending one afternoon a week at an organization called the Children's Place. A refuge for drug-addicted or HIV/AIDS infected babies, I simply came into their temporary place of living and held, fed, rocked, diapered, or played with these beautiful children of God.

Today, Tuesday, December 1st, has been set aside to remember those people living and dying throughout our world because of AIDS. While drugs available to those afflicted with AIDS in wealthier nations like our own have perhaps caused us to forget the painful reality of those suffering from this disease, there are 92,000 children in Ethiopia and 33.4 million people worldwide infected with AIDS. A few months back I came across an article written by Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, entitled, "Women and Orphans: The Hidden Faces of AIDS." Below is an excerpt:

Years from now, the AIDS pandemic will be judged as one of those rare crossroads in human history, where everything that comes after it will be seen through its lens. Every generation struggles with events and crises that ultimately define it. Every generation has its sins- of commission and omission. The lens of history can be brutally honest in its judgment.

How could American pioneers justify their treatment of Native Americans? How could pre-Civil-War America have tolerated slavery? How could churches in America have turned a blind eye to racial discrimination in the '40s and '50s? These are the kinds of questions history asks, and the questions that children and grandchildren ask of their parents and grandparents. 'Why didn't you act?' 'How could you remain silent?'

No one can predict the outcome of the AIDS crisis with certainty-whether vaccines will be found or whether the epidemic will be somehow stopped ten, fifty or one hundred years from today. No one can predict how many men, women and children will die, or how many orphans and widows will suffer in obscurity. No one can predict how this generation will be viewed through the lens of history. But I know that we cannot remain silent, and I am certain of what Jesus would have us do.

A call to action. I am certain about God's expectations of His people. I am certain that God sees these widows and orphans as our neighbors, lying beaten and bleeding on the side of the road, helpless and needing our help. And I am certain that He calls us to stop, show compassion, comfort them, bind up their wounds and see that they and their children are cared for.

Mother Teresa saw Christ in every dying beggar or leper she served. She once said this of these broken and forgotten souls: 'I see the face of Jesus in disguise- sometimes a most distressing disguise.' She understood that in serving the 'least of these,' she was not serving the loathsome and despicable but was privileged to serve the person of Jesus Himself.

We can reach out to the one: the one widow, the one orphan, the one father, the one mother. We can demonstrate the love of Christ to these dear children who have lost their parents...We can come alongside grandparents, aunts and uncles trying to raise these orphaned children. And we can comfort the sick and dying and offer them hope for a new life in Christ. We can reach out to the 'least of these.'

Jesus ends the parable of the Good Samaritan with a powerful challenge. When he asked the expert in the law which of the three men had been a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers, he answers with a new understanding: 'The one who had mercy on him.'

Jesus then looks at this man and concludes what is perhaps the most powerful moral teaching in all of history with a command of just four words. Four words that reverberate through history. Four words that declare Christ's expectations of every Christian. Four words with the power to change the world.

'Go and do likewise.'