As I write our world is fraught. None of us has lived on the cusp of international disaster before. This is new and it is scary. I turn to scripture for guidance and comfort and the following stands out:
“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust… Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, last thou dash thy foot against a stone… Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. With long life I will satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.”
Excerpted from Psalm 91 KJV
Indeed, as the old hymn puts it, “In thee O Lord do I put my trust…”. He is no absentee landlord. He is Lord and Father of us all.
I’ve been connecting recently with an old friend who has just gone through a serious medical crisis and surgery. As we’ve conversed it has struck me again that in the midst of ongoing global dramas, both geopolitical and environmental, there are daily stresses suffered by all of us personally. Most relate to health and some to random accidents but all have impact. Suddenly we may be in a hospital bed surrounded by medical personnel and concerned family members and the vulnerabilities of life take centre stage. We’re thrown physically, emotionally, and spiritually, face to face with our mortality. None of us wants this even though we know, as Shakespeare put it, “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”.
At times like this the scriptures take on sudden comforting relevance. The Bible says, “The times of our lives are in His hands”, and, “As your days so shall your strength be”. Yes we’re mortal but there is so much more to life than this short space and time adventure. Our creator has plans for us on the other side of the grave. In His vast universe we will have a role. His word says we’ll “rule and reign with Him”. Whoa! One’s mind boggles at the possibilities. Perhaps this is why St.Paul said he’d rather be with the Lord but he’d redeem the time on earth until that glorious day of entry into the heavenly realm. There’s more to life than meets the eye.
“But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me!” Matthew 14:30
In Exodus 17 we read the story of the battle between Israel and the Amalekites championed by three men in their eighties! Moses (80 years), his brother Aaron (83 years), and their brother-in-law Hur (must have been of similar age), stood on a hill above the conflict. Moses with the “staff of God” raised over his head and his brother and brother-in-law holding up his arms as they tired, saw the Lord vanquish the enemy with Joshua leading Israel’s army. It was a classic biblical example of God’s power enabling those who pray, support, and fight in the cause of righteousness and justice.
WOW is currently engaged in a battle for righteousness and justice, but not with a temporal enemy. We’re facing a war with the one who the Bible says “seeks to kill and destroy”. His weapon is HIV & AIDS. Ours is the combination of prayer, funding, and faithfulness.
We’ve fought this battle for 25 years, and with the arrival of very expensive yet vital Antiretroviral (ARV) medications 20 years ago, funded by PEPFAR – President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief – there has been real progress. Now that USAID support for PEPFAR has been suspended our ministry partners in Africa and India are in crisis. We may be back to the early days when AIDS was always fatal.
Here’s the latest from one of our champion pastors:
“The last few weeks have been a true roller coaster. We were told to stop all programs supported by the US government but we put a small group of our dedicated staff together to keep serving the most pressing needs. Our Kabwe site has lost all its USAID support so it’s now permanently closed. Our Livingstone and Lusaka clinics have been allowed to continue until September 2025. We are urgently looking for ways to keep the ministry going but so far we have no solution. One third of our support for general pharmaceuticals (dealing with opportunistic infections) has been discontinued due to recently revealed Zambian government corruption. Thus we have added stress. We may soon be stymied.”
Rev Helmut Reutter, Founder and President CHRESO ministries Zambia
I’m hearing similar expressions of deep concern from all of our champion ministry partners in Zambia, South Africa, Malawi, and India.
These “salt of the earth” champions are “Jesus’ hands extended” to the “least of these”. Like Moses’ extended hands they are growing weary. They need an Aaron and a Hur.
WOW continues to provide the pharma and selenium funding, an integral part of the Home Based Care (HBC) ministry with the weekly visits to thousands of people under our partners’ care. WOW has increased food support by 35% to our partner “Somebody Cares” in Malawi where we’re feeding 8000 orphans, widows, and grannies each month, and we’ve funded solar electric systems to ICO (Impact Community Outreach) and CHRESO in Zambia. Now Somebody Cares needs a solar system as well.
As never before in our 25 year history we need “Aaron and Hur” to hold up the hands of our humble, faithful ministry friends. Their sense of urgency is palpable. WOW is a proven champion of champions. Together we have and will continue to pray, support, and fight the good fight.
The analogy may be a bit of a stretch but I see WOW as “Moses”, you as “Aaron and Hur”, and our on the ground champions as “Joshua”.
In faithful concert we will prevail! Ultimately “the battle is the Lord’s”.
I’ve been asked over the past 25 years why we do what we do with WOW. The short answer is that it’s clear from scripture that we should care for orphans and widows in their distress. The long answer is that one hears and obeys the Lord’s calling to service over one’s entire lifetime. Sometimes that “hearing and calling” comes via an “epiphany”.
In a book I’m currently writing, I reference the Apostle Paul’s conversion from Saul, the rabidly anti-christian rabbi, to Paul, the first missionary to the Gentiles and author of most of the New Testament’s theology:
“Blinded by the intense heavenly light Saul fell from his horse and hitting the ground called out, ’What should I do Lord?’ In this immediate response Saul knew with whom he was dealing. This was his enemy, Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and resurrected one, but he was enemy no more- now he was ‘Lord’. There is no explanation for this instant recognition of the Lord other than this encounter was both vision and epiphany, a manifestation of the divine. It was focused on the solitary Saul. The others with him ‘saw the light’ but did not hear the voice. It was the moment this single soul became a ‘witness unto all men’ of the deity of the risen Christ.”
So, vision in combination with calling can produce unexpected and life changing outcomes. One needs to hear and obey the heavenly voice.
We’ve just celebrated Mother’s Day and have, no doubt, emailed, texted, and/or had lunch with the women who brought us into the world and became our first educators. We’ve “praised them with great praise”, which is more than mere sentiment. It expresses the deep roots of life’s meaning.
There’s almost something mystical about “mother’s love”. It seems to have remarkable, sustaining power. Again and again, we hear testimonies from people both famous and not so famous declaring the massive life-long impact of their mothers upon their lives. They sometimes seem almost divine in their presence. They are perhaps our foremost influencers.
Indeed we hear it said again and again that there is no one who has a more lasting impact on both our individual lives and on the world itself. As my kids might put it, “Mothers rule!”
So it’s good that we give a day to honour them. But the greatest honour is to live lives worthy of their love.
As is always the case WOW’s ministry on the ground in Africa is awash in adversity. From drought, crop failure, electrical grid “load shedding” (up to 18hrs a day without electricity!) and the grind of endemic poverty, to recent USAID funding withdrawal, our champions and their impoverished, diseased volunteers and communities are hard pressed to find hope.
The most pressing of these urgencies is the USAID abandonment of the anti-retro-viral (ARV) programs that have literally saved millions of Africans and Indians from death these past 20 years. Former US President George W. Bush initiated his PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) vision during his tenure. It no doubt will be his lasting legacy, eclipsing even that iconic moment when he took the loud speaker on the pile of ruins at the site of the 911 attack.
WOW is taking this personally. We have about 1200 volunteers at work. The majority of them are widows themselves and are HIV positive. But ARV’s have kept their viral loads at an imperceptible level giving them life. ARV’s, however, only suppress the disease. As soon as a patient stops or is forced to discontinue the meds the HIV virus reawakens and slowly but surely death is at the door.
Suddenly, because of the precipitate action of the White House, we’re back to where we were 25 years ago where an HIV diagnosis is 100% fatal.
So there is a rising tide of anxiety as the current stockpile of ARV meds is about to be exhausted. What’s more the aforementioned crop failure in MALAWI has seen the cost of maize meal, their daily staple, increase by 35%. Indeed the cost of everything in MALAWI, ZAMBIA, and SOUTH AFRICA has gone up significantly. Stress is pandemic.
Rather than a wail of woe, however, I choose to see opportunity in this dark picture. We’ve always seen ourselves as lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness, and now, more than ever in our 25 year history I believe WOW has “come to the Kingdom for such a time as this”.
We’ve already increased our food support to Somebody Cares Malawi by 35%. We’ve added a solar electric system to Rob’s Farm in Zambia so that the new maize mill we provided can operate during load shedding hours, and we’ve also funded a solar system for our CHRESO ministry in the rural south.
In Johannesburg our champion ministry CrossConnect have just about completed the second House Nehemiah that we funded last year and it will be focused on the rescue and care of sexually abused girls.
And in war ravaged UKRAINE where our support is so valued we continue to provide food and clothing relief for our partner “Loads of Love” (LOL). We give little public profile to this work but there are several faithful WOW donors who share our compassion for these beleaguered people. Just last week the Russians attacked a neighbourhood a few blocks from one of LOL’s distribution centres with 6 children killed.
The Lord loves “the least of these” and so do we in Jesus’ name. Money is no issue for Him. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills and will supply our need according to his riches in glory. All we need to do is to stay faithful and keep growing.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the culture challenging book, “The Anxious Generation” was interviewed recently by Katty Kay of the BBC about the negative influence of smart phones on children. It’s an insightful and revealing interview (worth googling). He observes the various downsides of smartphones, one of them being that they are providing refuge of a sort for parents “over parenting” in what’s seen as an increasingly dangerous world. Parents don’t want to allow their kids out into that danger. They’d rather see them alone in house with their phones. Says Haidt, “We’re not going to restore trust in our neighbors such that we can let our kids out. That’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s likely to get a lot worse as we go into the era of Artificial Intelligence, when we have no idea of what’s true. We’re never going to know what’s true again for a long time, if ever.”
Whoa! As I read this, I thought of Pontius Pilate’s rhetorical question as Jesus was brought before him for judgement, “What is truth?” This question resonates throughout history. Truth is the foundation for life. If that foundation is shaken who can build a life?
Now, more than ever before, we need to hear and believe Jesus when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…”. His words are truly relevant today.
In our western culture where the buzz words have been “your truth…my truth…our truth” (all relative terms) it’s time to rediscover THE truth. Jesus is “the same yesterday, today, and forever”.
Recently a few personal friends have been diagnosed with serious illnesses. As is often the case these afflictions came on suddenly. From one day to the next they went from life as usual to what Shakespeare famously described as “a walking shadow who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. It’s brutal being blindsided by our mortality.
The transitory nature of life is a key component in WOW’s vision for ministry to the dying. As mentioned in my last blog, the spectre of certain death is again rearing its ugly head in Africa due to the suspension of PEPFAR funding for ARV (antiretroviral) medication. HIV afflicted people who had been living free from worry because of these meds are now facing a grim future ending in an early grave.
So WOW is back to square one facing the urgencies of an always fatal disease like we did when we started 25 years ago. But we’re committed to the faithful care of the “least of these” in spite of the perfect storm of sorrow that prevails. Every patient we have cared for through our champion volunteer partners over the years has felt the physical touch of the extended “hands and feet of Jesus” to their last breath.
And as we reach out in Jesus’ name we’re reminded of our own mortality. Truly “the times of our lives are in his hands”.
The recent decision by the White House to shut down USAID is having a chilling effect on WOW’s African ministry partners. For 25 years WOW has been on the forefront mobilizing local African churches in the care of orphans and widows victimized by HIV and AIDS. This has seen us engaged not only with this fatal disease but also with the opportunistic infections and poverty related afflictions that accompany the pandemic. And pandemic it is, even though HIV and AIDS has been on the back burner of global awareness since anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) arrived on the scene about 20 years ago.
These lifesaving meds have muted the reality that hundreds of thousands of Africans still live with HIV. Now, however, with former president Bush’s amazing intervention called PEPFAR (Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) no longer paying for ARVs (due to USAID withdrawal) the myriad of Africans living with HIV have been medically orphaned and face the grim reality of living with a 100% fatal disease. For us at WOW this means our Home Based Care ministry (HBC) to thousands has been dealt a major blow.
We’re back to ministering exclusively to the dying. This, of course, is what we did in the early days of WOW, so our on the ground ministry partners in Zambia, South Africa, Malawi, and India are not being caught flatfooted. But they are chagrined.
The key in every circumstance is faithfulness. We have been for 25 years, and will be for the indefinite future, totally committed to ministering to whom Jesus called “the least of these”. Our local church based volunteers will continue to provide HBC in Jesus’ name and WOW will continue to raise awareness and funding for the massive challenge ahead.
