Sunday Night Reflections: What Brought Me to Tears this Week

I cried this week. They tell me that is what happens when one begins to get a prophets heart--you weep. Partly because you begin to feel the sadness that you speak and live against. Partly because of your fear that no one will listen to your message. Jeremiah (the Old Testament prophet) was called the weeping prophet. This week I understood why.

Sienna and I were on a walk around Tssawwassen--the town I live in--she in her comfortable little baby carrier, strapped to the front of me--me on a mission to get coffee at Tim Horton's, iPod in my ears listening to the Massey Lecture series by Stephen Lewis, former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations called A Race Against Time--about the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the continent of Africa. He was telling a story about a group of teenagers he was speaking to in Africa and one of the fourteen year old girls said that the boys were all pressuring her to have sex with them and the girls were laughing at her because she refused--they called her silly. She asked Stephen Lewis pointedly in a crowded auditorium: "Do you think it's stupid to not want to die?"At that point the entire crowd stood to their feet in applause in support of the girls question. It was at this precise moment, I remember it vividly, that I began to physically cry and mourn.

I was, in Jeremiah's language, "Lamenting" the realities of this world, specifically the dark world of this girl and everything she represented to me: the evils of humankind, the folly of human politics/ oppressive economic ideologies and practices (those of the IMF, the Bank of America, etc.), the continued spread of this disease because of carelessnes and promiscuity--Yes which those who continue to make those decision are to blame for--but that carelessnes is often due to ignorance and lack of education--which is something we could help change, but also because the disease continues to go unchecked, though the Western world clearly has the means of treating it--Magic Johnson anyone!--which is great, but we should live in a world where the rich are not the only ones who get to live healthily with AIDS. The poor need help as well until we can cure it. Jesus was a prophet who wept and he loved and helped lepers and other diseased outcasts of his society--he would do the same today with those living with this terrible disease.

May we think and pray on Africa this coming month--I know we all feel helpless...but there are things we can do. We just need to dare to dream. Like the prophets did.