Kay Warren is the wife of renowned pastor and author Rick Warren (Purpose Driven Life), and works as the executive director of the HIV/AIDS initiative of her husband’s church at Saddleback in Southern California. Yesterday, she spoke out regarding the depth of her feelings over the HIV/AIDS pandemic in a special webcast put together for World Aids Day.
Warren said that the pandemic weighs her down heavily, and that she has not been the same since a day seven years ago when she read that 12 million children were orphaned in Africa due to AIDS. Warren said she was initially paralysed by the enormity of the suffering, but gradually came to the realization that she could make a difference.
“I just knew that Kay Warren, Christian, had to say yes to God. From there I began to learn and study. God just broke my heart. He just wiped me out. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t cry over what I’ve learned and what I’ve seen,” she said.
The statistics are frightening: it is believed that 15 million children worldwide are orphaned by AIDS. The UNAIDS 2010 global report estimates 33.3 million people, including some 2.3 million children, were living with HIV at the end of 2009. Most of the people living with HIV are located in Africa.
Since 2005, Saddleback has hosted an annual Global Summit on AIDS and this event has gathered together presidential candidates, medical and scientific experts, AIDS activists, and pastors from around the world.
Warren testified that she now lives in three worlds. The first world is one of a normal suburban American wife and mom who does her grocery shopping, cares for a family, and does church work. The second world she lives in is one where “she hears the cries, the sounds of babies abandoned in fields,” the faces of orphans whose parents will not come home, and the bodies of people with AIDS wasting away.
“That’s the world that threatens to take me down. But it’s the third world that I live in that makes it all possible,” said Warren, referring to her ongoing relationship with God. “It is being in communion with Him every day, being in His presence, drawing strength and love and sustenance to fight the evil that is in this world, to be His hands and feet.”
Warren urged churches to reach people even in the most rural places, to address HIV/AIDS using an acronym she and her husband came up with: CHURCH. The acronym stands for: care for and support those infected and affected; handle testing and counseling; unleash a volunteer labor force; reduce stigma; champion healthy behavior; and help with medication and nutrition.
“We live in those three worlds. Most of us as Americans are content to only live in two and I think He’s asking us to live in three,” concluded Warren.
(Image is of Kay Warren addressing the last Saddleback Global Summit on AIDS).