Perhaps you remember Wednesday. Wednesday was my Bad Day, and Thursday was only moderately better. I was still on crutches, and I was still a single parent at the end of the day. Friday too. And by Friday night, when Bill came home after midnight, I was getting Cranky.
He was home so late that night, and up and out very late several nights before that, because he was getting ready for the Carolina Hope Festival. The HopeFest, which was his very own brainchild, took place Saturday at the American Tobacco Amphitheater downtown. He first thought of doing this over a year ago: holding a music festival to raise money for Beacon of Hope. Beacon of Hope is an organization in Nairobi that ministers to women infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. Begun by the Kenyan women themselves, the ministry is supported by our church and others in their effort to support themselves. They have a weaving industry, daycare for their children, and a community in which they themselves are loved and cared for.
Regardless, at midnight on Friday I was Cranky. I think I have mentioned this. Bill and Jeff woke me up when they came in, and I had a terrible time going back to sleep. Didn’t they remember that I am a cripple, for crying out loud, and, due to their shenanigans downtown, had just had my third evening alone with three children??? Add to that the headache, the peg-leg contraption that I just can’t get used to, almost falling how many times, and Serious Fatigue. I did my Absolute Best not to pick a fight, and managed to go back to sleep sometime toward two a.m.
Of course Bill was gone first thing on Saturday, and Look! I’m a single parent again, hustling the children into readiness for The Big Day. By the time Mimi came to get them I was exhausted, and gave Ken the wrong directions twice before we were even out of my neighborhood.
Then we arrived at the Amphitheatre.
And here words abandon me. I’ve tried, believe me, but it all comes out like bad journalism. Suffice it to say that it was amazing. That it was beautiful. That it was one of the Best Days of my Life.
First of all, the weather was wonderful. A little cold for the people in the shade, but beautiful for us lying in the grass. The sky was its Carolina best; when clouds finally did come, they were the thin, transparent kind, few and far between. It was gorgeous in the sun with the Lucky Strike water tower stark white against the blue sky.
And the music.
Everyone was great. Everyone. There wasn’t a bad band, there wasn’t a moment that made me cringe, when I wished something else were going on. We went from one great performance to another: Bill Deasy, The Basics, Thad Cockrell, SpencerAcuff. And all the while children played catch or with hoola hoops on the lawn, and people ate genuine African cuisine, and listened, and sunbathed, and chatted with friends, and looked at rugs woven by the women of Beacon of Hope. The musicians themselves didn’t stay hidden in the green room, but roamed around and listened and enjoyed themselves.
I can’t decide what the highlight was. Maybe it was at the end, when it was growing dark, and Jeff showed up with Linda on her cane. She stayed until the very end. But even better was sitting with her and Bill and Margie and Michael, Bonnie and Allen, Ken and Debbie, Nat and Rachel and baby Levi, with Jars of Clay singing, and every song sounding better than the last, and all of us (well, some of us) singing along in harmony at the top of our voices. We already knew that not enough people had come. Bill was already guessing that they might not have broken even. But we were deliriously happy; we were having a wonderful time.
At one point I turned to Rachel and told her that someday we’ll be at the 3rd HopeFest, or the 4th, and it will be wildly successful from an attendance standpoint, and we’ll turn to one another and say, “But remember the first one? It was really the Very Best.” Rachel agreed with me, and smiled, and said, “And you’ll be walking.” I looked at baby Levi, fast asleep in her lap, and I said, “And so will he.”
Baby Levi lay in my arms for the entire length of the symposium, the discussion that preceeded the HopeFest in the appropriately named Symposium Cafe. While I tried and tried to convince him to sleep, I and about fifty others listened to a conversation among Jars of Clay, Jim Thomas (epidemiologist studying AIDS at UNC), Jana Piepenbring (friend of Beacon of Hope women), Jenna (spokesperson for Jars of Clay’s Blood:Water Mission) and Kyama Mugambi (visiting pastor from Nairobi Chapel in Kenya). And maybe this, here at the very beginning, was the highlight. Because here was a conversation with people from very different perspectives, with dramatically different experiences, who were all passionate about the same thing: the response of the Church to the crisis of AIDS in Africa.
I have to say that I was deeply humbled by this conversation, because Very Honestly, it is not my natural state to care about this. It is my natural state to blame Africa for her problems, to consider the issue too large for me to affect, to be frightened that it might affect me, and to let my fear hold the issue at arm’s length.
What I was reminded of, sitting there, is that Christ didn’t spend any time discussing the moral shortcomings of his culture. He didn’t lecture on its need for moral restraint. He did go ballistic on the Pharisees, people who should have known better. And what did he tell them? Among other things, he said it was the sick who needed a doctor.
Sickness of many varieties is rife in Africa, but it is sickness prospered in part by the complacency and obesity of the West, by my willingly blind eye, by my insistence that I live in the U.S. and by a compassion that ends at her borders instead of in the global community that I believe Christ died for.
The problem of AIDS in Africa is monstrous, outrageous, overwhelming. It is a problem that is Too Big To Be Solved.
And we did not sell enough tickets on Saturday to make much money at all for Beacon of Hope.
But more than $4000 worth of rugs, made by the women of Beacon of Hope, were sold at the HopeFest on Saturday. And all of us who were there are thinking now about AIDS in Africa and the horrific loss of precious life there, and that we are Responsible To Help.
Did I say that I was cranky? Light and momentary trouble, my friends. Saturday was a fabulous day. Wonderful. Amazing. I’m so Glad I was There. So much Bigger than a silly broken foot.
Did I say it was Bill’s idea?
Well, I’m thinking- and I know he’d agree- he had a Little Help.
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material posssessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 1John3:16-17
