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Then when you take a look at Jesus' response in the New Testament, everybody knows a third of his ministry was healing the sick. And if you look at it and say: Did Jesus ever ask anybody, "How did you get sick?" We get stuck on the "How did you get sick? How did you become infected?" We look with everybody with HIV and assume they did something wrong and that's why they're sick. You will not find Jesus asking, "How did you get sick?" He just said, "What can I do? How can I help you?"

First, we need to get God's heart on how he feels about people who are sick. Second, we need to model our ministries after the way Jesus treated people. Third, we need to come alongside and build relationships with people that says it doesn't really matter to me whether you put yourself at risk or you didn't put yourself at risk. The point is I'm going to care for you. My response is going to be the same.

Why are so many secular groups still resistant to working against HIV with evangelicals?

They've experienced us as those who reject rather than accept. Anyone who's HIV positive, the stigma is overwhelming, not just here in the United States, but around the world. Our rejecting attitude, I think, is our biggest barrier. They get caught on our messages about prevention. We get caught on the "How did you get sick?"

Your new book is entitled Dangerous Surrender. Does your own surrender to God's will still feel dangerous to you?

Every day I look up to the heavens and I say, "God, if I didn't believe you were good, I couldn't do this, because what you ask is so hard and it pushes me so far outside of my comfort zone, so far beyond what I think I can do and how I can respond."

In your book, you talk about being disturbed by God. How can you be disturbed by HIV/AIDS without going crazy?

That's taken a while to learn, because I feel like I live in three worlds now. I used to just think I lived in two worlds. I lived in the world of where I raise my family, where I go to the grocery store, where I go to work. Then I have the spiritual world, the Ephesians 1 concept of being seated in the heavenlies, that spiritual world of which I'm primarily a citizen.

I just didn't know too much about the second world. I knew about it, but I didn't know how to live in it, that world where there's extreme suffering. Now I feel like I'm a citizen of three worlds, and I've only got two feet but somehow I'm straddling all three of those worlds.

The passage of Scripture that has helped me the most is Philippians 4:12-13, the part that's real famous is where Paul says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." When you look at the verses before that, suddenly you look at it in a different light.

In the verses before he says: I know what it's like to get along in plenty and I know what it's like to get along with nothing. I know what it's like to have more than an abundance and how to live with nothing. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Suddenly that relieved the guilt that I experienced after I first became disturbed. I didn't know how to live in this world where I live where there's so much, and I felt guilty about everything.

How has your personal sickness, with cancer, influenced your faith?

I'm just not the same person that I used to be. I'm willing to live with pain. I'm willing to let the suffering of others wound me. Through that, as I mentioned in Dangerous Surrender, I have discovered a different kind of relationship with God. I understand in ways that I never did before what it means to share in the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ. While I cry every day, while I remain disturbed and ruined by what I have seen and witnessed both in myself and around the world, he is more real because of what I have seen. And I wouldn't trade that.

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November 2007, Vol. 51, No. 11