“Facing Darkness”

This Thursday there’s a one-night showing of a powerful documentary about faith in the face of a deadly epidemic.
If you saw people dying all around you from a plague you didn’t understand and couldn’t control, what would you do?

For Samaritan’s Purse staff members faced with the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Liberia, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. Their answer, because of God’s love and the courage that love gave them, was to join Christians throughout history who ran toward the plague, not away from it.

But to fully understand the power of that decision, we need to take a step back.

Ebola is a terrifying disease. It causes extreme pain, fever, terrible bouts of diarrhea and vomiting and, until effective treatments were developed, was almost always fatal. And because it’s transferred by body fluids, even wiping the brow or holding the hand of someone infected with Ebola means you’re susceptible to getting it, too.

When this horrifying disease broke out in Liberia in