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Good Morning The Ebola outbreak in West Africa seems at last to be starting to come under control. Last night the World Health Organisation reported that the disease has been contained in Senegal and Nigeria, though it re-iterated the urgent need for affected countries to ramp up their responses and continue to train and protect health workers under threat from frightened populations. It is perhaps difficult for those of us who live in a country where there are about 270 doctors per 100,000 of population to imagine what it is like for those living in a place like Sierra Leone where there are only 3 doctors for the same number trying to deal with a highly contagious disease that has no available vaccine or treatment. In such a context it is perhaps not surprising that people look for meaning where there seems to be none, and that they turn to tried and tested ideas about God’s punishment, drawing parallels with the plagues of Egypt, blaming the outbreak on particular social groups and claiming that only those protected by God’s hand will be delivered. In the Bible there are plenty of examples of such connections being made between sickness and sin, and even amongst the generally agnostic population of this country, sudden disease or injury can make us ask why and look for reasons in our own behaviour, rehearsing our regrets about the past and bargaining with God about the future. But, although there may be times when a period of illness or some other crisis can prompt us as individuals, or even as nations, into important thinking about the meaning of our lives, and even into turning away from behaviours which do us and others no good, there is a world of difference between finding the strength to change our own ways through a shock we have received, and vulnerable groups being told by authority figures that they are sick because they are immoral or because God is angry with them. Such pronouncements may bolster the moral certainties of those who make them, but for those unfortunate enough to fall ill in a poor country through no fault of their own, fast on the heels of the terror of being sick, comes stigmatisation, isolation and the withdrawal of all kinds of help. In the ministry of Jesus, rather than withdrawing from those who were sick or socially outcast, he was constantly crossing boundaries to reach out to people, whether they were lepers who were contagious and considered unclean or haemorrhaging women who had exhausted all their funds on doctors who could not help, or even the morally dubious by the conventions of the time. Those who are in the field in West Africa fighting this disease - both Christians and others - deserve our support as they contribute to the successes announced yesterday. To me, it is clear that if God is to be found in the Ebola outbreak, he is not in the scapegoating of particular social groups, but is alongside those who are the disease’s victims, and embodied in those who take risks to help.