Hope

An article caught my eye yesterday and sent happy shivers down my spine. It's from Forbes Online and it reads, in big in bold letters, "Potential Cure for HIV Discovered." (Read the full article at
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/06/28/afx3868315.html )

The story is dense in science, with references to molecular biology and recombynase and enzymes. But beneath the abstract concepts and the convoluted language is a quietly surging groundswell of hope. And the source of all hope, I believe, is God.

However they warned that there were significant barriers to overcome before the enzyme could be used to help cure patients. 'The most important, and likely most difficult, among these is that the enzyme would need efficient and safe means of delivery and would have to be able to function without adverse side effects,' wrote lead author Indrani Sarkar of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. 'Nevertheless the results we present offer an early proof of principal for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies,' Sarkar concluded.

To all of our friends in Swaziland who suffer under the burden of AIDS, we would say: Hold on.

God is at work. Hold on. We might wish he would work faster, but just look at the broken and imperfect tools he has to work with.

Hold on.