Through the ages, religious faith has helped people live their lives in a world that has always been fraught with danger and disease. That basic fact has not changed. It is as true today in the midst of the devastating global AIDS/HIV pandemic as it has been in times of plague and war, famine and flood, the rise of modern killers such as cancer and heart disease, and other crises.

Speaking as a Christian, I would point to several understandings of God's will, rooted in the Bible and in traditional teachings, that sustain people in times of trial and that are given new currency in the AIDS/HIV crisis.

Among these is the insight that all of life is a gift from God, whether life is long or short, whether we are well or living with illness. AIDS/HIV, which disproportionately strikes so many vital, younger people, brings that message home with arresting clarity and confronts us with the need to rethink our definitions of what it really means to be alive.

Moreover, the knowledge that God loves us all equally does more than anything else to break down barriers of fear and prejudice between those with positive and negative AIDS/HIV status. God's love confers worth and dignity on each and every person.

Embracing God's call to life and to love helps us deal with the hard fact that bad things happen to all people. Making sense of ill health and disasters of all kinds is perhaps the most difficult dimension of our life on earth. As mortal beings, "we see through a glass, dimly," as the Bible puts it,* but we ache to know why such things happen. Even people of faith are sometimes tempted to impose order on what seems to be chaos by attributing disaster to God's judgment. Such thinking can serve as a psychological defense mechanism in that it gives us the illusion of control, the idea that, if we are "good," we can avoid suffering.