I’ve been thinking a lot about human trafficking and child slaves and just the corruption of society in these contexts in general.  Every so often I get these overwhelming feelings about certain topics like this, and I honestly don’t know what to do with them.  Maybe it’s God’s way of telling me to snap out of complacency and just open my eyes and wake up to reality; either way, I’m sure He’s put it on my heart for a reason.

There was this guy named Ben Cooley who spoke at a conference I went to this past summer.  He started an organization called Hope for Justice, which basically aims to rescue and love people in unfortunate situations such as these.  Something he said while he was speaking has stuck with  me ever since, and lately I keep replaying in my head.

He was talking about this girl they went to rescue.  Something like her family had come to them and didn’t know what to do, and so they had spent weeks or months or however long planning how they were going to free her.  They had to physically go to this place where abuse was normality, and they had to pretend they were the very “customers” that they were trying to rescue her from.  They had to stand there, waiting in a line of 7 or 8 other men who didn’t bat an eye at the concept.  They had to act normal – normal in a situation where every instinct and every ounce of you just wants to scream at the blindness to the massive amounts of injustice.  I think the thing that hit me most was that when they went to rescue her, they had to wait while she was abused by these 8 other men.  They had to stand there, knowing what was happening, and knowing that it was only a matter of minutes before she was freed.  It’s just that, during that time – in the process of freeing her – she went through more abuse than most of us will ever know.  How can we ignore that?  How can we not want to give up everything and fix this?

I think a lot of times we feel like there’s nothing we can do about the situation, but the fact is, we can do more than we know.  I realize we don’t all have the funds to fly to Cambodia, or Thailand, or Romania, or wherever, but maybe we don’t all have to.  We can learn and try to understand, we can talk about it, and we can pray.  Some are blessed with the strength and courage to rescue these people first hand, but maybe some of us are called to do other things – that doesn’t make us less willing or less faithful.  Maybe we’re called to raise awareness, to open eyes, to yell to a half-deaf society that what’s happening needs to stop happening.  Or maybe we’re called to pray.

Either way, we’re called to love, and ignorance has no part in love.