Living with AIDS and Trusting God

Spiritual Resources

A personal testimony on finding faith, hope, and true surrender through a diagnosis of full-blown AIDS.

Author: Joseph Hallett
Ministry Director for Outpost Inc.

Resource Details

Category:

Type:

Personal Testimony / Article

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Online Article

“Your blood test was abnormal.” The nurse at the other end of the telephone line sounded tentative. I faltered and paused for a moment. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“You tested HIV positive.”

Hands shaking, I hung up the phone. I felt as if this were the end of the world. I found out later that besides being HIV positive, I had full-blown AIDS.

While in college I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour, but it had taken me seven years to leave the gay lifestyle. Now, just eight months after making the break, I was diagnosed with AIDS. I felt betrayed by God. I had given up everything familiar to follow him, but he hadn’t insulated me from this tragedy. I turned to friends, doctors, family members, the church. None of them offered any hope for my future.

The first months I felt desperate and lonely. I didn’t want to be holy or perfect; I just wanted to be honest. So I told God about my pain, my sorrow. Amazingly, when despair and hopelessness threatened to overpower me, my sense of God’s presence increased.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”1

Some people thought that I should measure my life out in small doses. I had friends with AIDS who spent all of their energy trying to eat right, to take the right pills, to do anything that might extend their lives. The verses in Jeremiah encouraged me not to hang on to my life as if I could save myself, but to live, to trust God, to step into life. I sensed God’s encouragement to write, to buy a house, to enter into ministry and in 1994 to marry.

I have been hospitalized many times. To other people my times in the hospital may have appeared unbearable; actually they have been the easiest part of living with this disease. The difficult times are the daily aches and pains that I suffer in secret. I live with chronic pain: my skin hurts; my head, bones, stomach and back hurt. I have had shingles and pneumonia that has lasted for months. There are days, weeks, months when I feel as though I’m falling apart.

Every time that I get a new cough, a new rash, a weekend of diarrhea or other problems, I am confronted by my mortality. And each time that I become sick, I am faced with another opportunity to try to save my life. Yet I now realize that to live, I must surrender my life.

Once, for nearly a year, I could do almost nothing. I suffered from bone-numbing exhaustion. A good day for me was getting the dishes washed—it took me two or three hours. The bad days were worse. I felt as if my prayers were just bouncing off the ceiling. It seemed that God had brought me so far and then had left me to die.

But instead of giving up, I read the Bible, and I fought to see the God who was for me. I hung on as Jacob had at the brook of Jabbok. I said to God, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”2 I took his Word personally. In lonely times I held on to his promises. I held on because God is trustworthy.

Though it has been a painful process learning to depend on God rather than on me, it has been worthwhile. I didn’t realize how firmly I had assumed control over my life until that control was stripped from me. Lying in hospital bed, barely breathing and unable to move or to swallow, I was confronted with my ambition to be the master of my life.

When all power was taken away, I had only two choices: bitterness or surrender. At first I tried to hang on to what control remained, keeping the nurses and my family happy. But as the weeks progressed, I became tired of keeping everyone hopeful and entertained. Finally, I just let it go. I prayed, “Into Your hands, I commit my life.”

When I surrendered my need to control, I became overwhelmed with peace. All my life I have struggled to prove that I am valuable. After contracting AIDS, I came to realize that my self-worth doesn’t come from what I do, but from Christ.

I believe that the gay world can never meet my needs. When I am confronted with temptation to go back to my old life, I have learned to look for God’s alternatives: I made it my responsibility to find a church that challenges, supports and encourages me to be holy, not a church that just makes me feel good; I have joined support groups that deal with my addictions and my brokenness; and I surround myself with friends who will tell me the truth rather than cater to my old sinfulness.

I was told that I would live for only two years, but I have lived for 11 years. The past 11 years have been the best years of my life. I am thankful that I have been allowed to struggle with AIDS because it has pushed me toward God. It made me pay attention to my heart and to my life; it forced me to get to know God.

I have come to see everything—trials, life, family, friends, ministry, house, gardens, even blood transfusions—as gifts from my Father.

Surrender has become my key in life—not just my key to surviving AIDS, but my key to hope and joy. My way is not a stoic resignation, battered by the difficulties of life. Nor is my way that of a wide-eyed optimist. I choose to face the world with hope and faith, acknowledging that sorrow and pain are real, yet always remembering from where my strength comes.

God is in charge. Everything that he allows in my life, good or bad, has been for a purpose. Life is an adventure. I’m always waiting to see what God will do next.

God’s “divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”3

Footnotes & Scripture References:
(1) Jeremiah 29:11-13, NIV.
(2) Genesis 32:26, NIV.
(3) 2 Peter 1:3, NIV.
Originally published in DECISION Magazine, September 1997. Copyright ©1997 Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

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