Last week, my husband jumped out of an airplane.

For a sermon illustration.

He's done lots of things for sermon illustrations. He has used real fire and real chain saws to drive a point home. He uses the verbal illustration most often. He talks about me, his kids, and his friends in sermons all the time.  If you know him long enough, you will appear in the weekly sermon. It's an honor, actually. Well, most of the time. He once tattled on me to the whole congregation, claiming that I was a "cusser", a foul mouthed human being. The congregation laughed, because they all knew he was exaggerating,  and I had to answer a thousand questions about the incident inthe hallways after the service. In my defense, I uttered one small word (not even a really bad one) in front of my kids and they delighted in repeating it over and over. They told daddy and a sermon illustration was born. You just can't trust kids these days. I must note here that sometimes the stories in his messages are stretched the ever most teensiest bit.

Interesting NY Times article, and maybe more interesting article responses.  To hope, or not to hope, seems to be the pivotal question. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world/01aids.html?_r=1&ref=health

There is no doubt that America has fallen on hard times. Unemployment rates are high, stock values have plummeted, and Americans are frequenting food banks in numbers we haven't seen since the Great Depression. 

You might call it another inconvenient truth.

While condoms can reduce the possibility of contracting AIDS through sexual intercourse, the only way to completely avoid the disease is still the unpopular practice of abstinence.

Absintence is also the only way to avoid unwanted pregnancies. 

The Pope is in Africa right now, and he finally articulated for the press what everyone has known anyway: his stand on how to help eradicate AIDS is to counsel people to practice absinence and sex exclusively within a monogamous marriage.