The Faces of HIV/AIDS
If you know someone who lives with HIV/AIDS, you may have put a face on AIDS. If you don’t know someone with HIV/AIDS, then for you, AIDS may be anonymous.
For Kathy Schoonover-Shoffner, the editor of the Journal of Christian Nursing, HIV/AIDS was not that difficult to deal with, when it was at a distance. But as she worked on the January-March 2007 issue, focusing on HIV/AIDS, she discovered how personal it really is.
“In looking at the problem of HIV/AIDS, I had ‘ranked’ sin,” she wrote in an editorial. “Subconsciously, I’d concluded that sexual promiscuity, illicit IV drug use, and other ‘big sins’ are worse than anything I do. It became clear that in ranking others’ sins, I failed to acknowledge how serious my sin is. I also failed to compassionately enter into the suffering of people with HIV/AIDS. I’d thought why don’t people just stop high risk behaviors? I realized they didn’t stop for the same reason I don’t stop losing my temper, thinking wrong thoughts, or overeating.
Grace Tazelaar, mission specialist for Nurses Christian Fellowship, has many faces for AIDS through her experience as a missionary in Uganda. They include the missionary physician who first alerted her to AIDS in 1985, the Ugandan government officials she worked with who developed policies for dealing with the health crisis, as well as the many AIDS patients she has treated.
“I am grateful that the Church in North America is awakening to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which affects us as members of a global community,” Grace writes in her article “Good Out of HIV/AIDS?” “The way we care for those in Africa and other parts of the world, such as Asia and Southeast Asia, where the disease is on the rise among the poor, widowed, and the orphaned, reflects whether we share God’s concern or not.”
Christian nurses are responding to the issues related to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, often through programs in their churches. Stories of how they are dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic are reported in the January-March issue of the Journal of Christian Nursing (JCN). JCN is now distributed through Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, where you can subscribe to JCN or obtain eprints of individual articles.
Mission Through the Lens of AIDS was one of the tracks at InterVarsity’s Urbana 06 Student Missions Convention, and the focus of an extended evening program during the Urbana 06 Convention.