They remembered that God was their Rock, that God Most High was their Redeemer. Psalm 78:35Today is World AIDS Day, observed every year on December 1st. The yearly remembrance and awareness day was established by The World Health Organization in 1988. Today, over a million Americans are estimated to be living with the disease and worldwide well over 33 million people are living with HIV. It is a day that governments, many faith traditions, community organizations, and individuals are provided with an opportunity to focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic.
I remember the first time I saw the AIDS quilt in the mid 1990's. Even in those days, there were enough panels that together covered an entire convention center floor. It was a sobering sight, more profound than viewing acres of headstones in a cemetery, because each of the panels was a personal product of love, carefully sewn together by those who made valiant attempts to sum up entire lifetimes in small rectangles of fabric. They varied as much as the personalities of those memorialized, and I noticed that the most repeated phrase in the religious ones often made reference to God as the Rock, the one immovable source of comfort and stability in the early days of the sudden epidemic's unexpected tragedies.
Most visitors that day were either silent or spoke in hushed tones and as I said my own silent prayers remembering many dear friends memorialized in cotton and felt, I began to realize that, whether we knew it or not, were not on a cold convention floor at all, but were reverently strolling on that same Rock that is always there to bear us in times of our greatest losses; the Rock of peace that passes understanding holding up those with faith as well as those without.
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