Breath and Gasoline:
Human Trafficking, Doubt and the
Reasons for it All
By: Ryan Glenn
It was an unspectacular
Friday evening when I knew we’d be doing a night drive. Unspectacular in the
sense that it was neither hot nor cold, rainy nor calm – it was an inauspicious
day that had become a similarly inauspicious evening; and yet, it was a night
when somewhere, some girls were being bought and sold by some men in some dark corner
of my city – of our world. For me it was nothing but a Friday-night-drinks-with-a-friend
sort of evening but for someone else it was another faceless darkness, another
numbing and brutal invasion of womanhood and innocence.
I knew this was
happening and yet I could not see it. I knew this and yet I could not find it.
I sensed the air around me as if I could feel a tear or a ripple in it, as if I
could sense any horror in the quivering of the wind, any cry for help or silent
plea to the God of Mercy. I could hear nothing and the wind only carried its
usual silent self onward.
* * * * *
This issue is a thorn in
my side. It is a shocking pain and it grieves my heart. It shakes my faith and
buckles my knees. And still, it’s one among many:
I know that this isn’t
the only bad thing happening in our world. I know other bad things happen and that
they happen all the time. I know that there is a numberless cacophony of deaths
and murders, wrongs and injustices wreaking their havoc in the broken hearts of
Men and in the lives of their victims every day and every night. I know this. I
stay up nights. I can’t breath sometimes – I know this.
I also know who my God
has said He is – that He is Good. That He is Just. That He is Merciful. That
His ways are above my ways and that in His redemptive plan He hears every cry
and knows every tear and sees, as we cannot, how exactly His Son the Christ
will one day actually and really make all things new, including this. I admit,
though – this is a hard place for my faith to grow. I find myself echoing the
Apostle Thomas frequently; “Lord, help my unbelief.” And He graciously does so.
I also know that God
loves everyone, including the girls who are sold and the men who buy and the
men who sell. Though we love to love victims and we love to hate victimizers (years
of hoping the bad guy will get it in the end have made that our common thought
currency), God sees all sides of this issue and judges all parties rightly as
equally broken and in need of a saving grace freely offered – a fact I have to
remind myself again and again, especially when I feel like grabbing a baseball bat
and meting out some ‘justice’ of my own to a man who would even think of
touching a young girl.
Thank God our God is not
like me. Thank God that He wants everyone to know Him. It takes only a short
glimpse at our own gracelessness to realize how unutterably amazing His gracefulness
is.
* * * * *
It is heavy with these
thoughts that I stand on this Friday night, sensing the air. Almost time to
drive.
We’ve planned to do our
drive on a Friday night because for many reasons it is an active night for this
sort of commerce. When we finally meet in a dark apartment parking lot, each of
us comes out of the shadows and into the light with relative severity. We pray
briefly and get going.
Two friends who have
worked with a wonderfully brazen woman from a local trafficking organization
are along with two others. We have a plan to drive to a short list of suspected
trafficking spots, picked out by this bold friend who is “in the business”. On
it are inauspicious places like salons and shoe stores – retail fronts set back
in forgotten industrial parks in the shadow of major freeways. Glamorless and
forgotten places – perfect for such illicit activity; by day, respectable and
plain and by night something entirely different. Evil is far less obvious and
far more congenial looking than we give it credit for. Our job is to visit the
locales, scope out the after-hours activity and pray for them. Along the way we
find ourselves also led to places not on our list – a shady strip joint here or
an all-night video store with a particularly active clientele parked out front
there. The good thing about prayer is that you can’t be wrong about a place –
everyone needs Jesus equally as much. Everyone needs saving grace. Everyone.
So, as an outpouring of
this grace, we gather in my car in the late hours to beseech our Good God to
act and to save and to rescue on our behalf. We pray for hearts to be broken
and lives to be changed, chains to be shattered and pleasure to turn to ashes.
We pray for demand to cease and for a city to be outraged for the sake of its
daughters and we pray for a society to learn that there is no true and lasting
satisfaction outside of knowing Rightly its Creator. Big prayers in a small
car, spoken to foggy windows beneath red blinking lights.
Our last stop is a small
sign in the back of a plain business park built in the mid-80s behind a busy
Hispanic nightclub. An unclear flyer found online told us to expect something
nearby.
So we sneak into the
back of the pay-only parking lot for free, somehow undetected as we drive by a
clamor of bouncers and valets, and we find the surest spot for what we’re
looking for. Slotted next to 5 or 6 silent storefronts, it’s a terrifyingly
open door well past midnight, unattended and unadorned. In the dim light a
couch and potted plant are visible, sitting in front of a cheap floor lamp, a ticket-booth
tinted window and a locked interior door with a small, lit doorbell. It’s so
plain it’s almost sickening. No one is around. We wait. We pray. Two men go in.
More waiting and no men come out. This place is clearly in business. We feel
powerless – who is inside? How many girls? How young? Do we call the cops – or
if we do will it be too late by the time the authorities make it around to
investigate? We know they rotate girls frequently to keep customers interested.
And as soon as the heat comes this place will dry up and move on, like they all
do. There are more questions and we cannot answer any of them. Another sleazy
flyer found online later tells us slightly more about the discreet Asian
massage parlor we’d found – it’s new in town, but we can still only guess
what’s next for it; as if we want to.
But in that parking lot
our prayers have a visible target and the reality hits home. Behind those
sun-faded tinted windows we know that the girls we pray for have faces and names
and families. We know that shame and lust and hurt are lurking so thickly
through those rooms and that a culture of sexual lies leaves men more empty and
more dead with every visit. We can see it and feel it.
And there we are,
huddled in a car in prayer because at the time it’s all we can do. We’re not here
to play Christian hero, and besides, it’s God who does praise worthy things
with us, anyway – not the other way around. We’re simply responding out of love
and duty to this enormous wound in our world. Love does in spite of itself for
the object of its affection, and in this case our Love for God and for a broken
world sent us to our knees for a few hours on this night in Dallas, Texas.
* * * * *
But can I be honest?
About this whole thing?
It almost felt hopeless
and dumb – spitting into the wind or taking one stone away from the Himalayas.
What can we do, anyway? How can we
stop such a thing as this and move these mountains even a millimeter? Can God
really break hearts and grieve a city? Can He really move in a society? Are we being
audacious to ask for such things?
The answer is yes but
it’s not an easy one.
But what did we even do?
Objectively – not figuratively?
Did we rescue anyone?
Did we blow the whistle on a trade being made in some dank alleyway at the last
second? Did we bring the light of the Gospel into a strip club’s back room or
the all-night massage parlor’s foyer, guns blazing and Holy Spirit speaking?
No.
And the cynical would
think then that we had actually done nothing at all, that our prayers went about
as far as the glass in my car windows, that bringing religion into this whole
mess is a pointless enterprise, that men have always bought sex and women
always sold it, that it’s merely a detestable fact that children get sucked
into it. Why waste the breath and the gasoline - and if we really cared that
much we’d just roll up our sleeves and do some saving ourselves.
And anyway, they might
ask, why don’t we just save something more easy to find, like dolphins or trees
or puppies?
Cynicism is a palpable
force in our world and if it wasn’t for faith it would mow down my spirit like
a scythe. But above the clamor of lies and snares and more powerful than the
spiritual darkness that holds sway over this stronghold of lust is a God who
has defeated sin and freed us from all bondage to it.
So, was it worth it?
Absolutely.
We were indeed audacious
in our prayers, but then was it not Jesus who promised His presence?
“For where two or three
are gathered in my name, there am I among them”
Matthew 18:20.
And then there’s this
audacious promise in 1 John 5:
"This is the
confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his
will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us - whatever we ask - we know
that we have what we asked of him." (v.
14-15)
And this God we approach
with such boldness is the God that delivered a captive nation and shook the
prison doors loose and promised to save billions in all nations through a man named
Abram. This is our God who can do all things and it is with full assurance and
hope we pray for Him to do in His power what we cannot.
And we didn’t do it just
once and we’ll do it again, too. We’ll keep praying and trusting that God can
move this mountain and that He is, through people like us and people like you,
at work. One day doors will be kicked down and rescues made. One day light will
shine into ever darker corners. One day…we pray and we labor.
“For the creation waits
with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was
subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in
hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption
and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Romans 8:19-21
