Help Me

 

As I stare at this keyboard in the dim light, I listen to the low hum of my dryer and my old furnace clunk away.  I'm safe from the cold, snuggled beneath a warm blanket and the people I love most sleep not far from where I sit.

 All seems well and right in my world.  I am comfortable.  I fear nothing.

Things might be just perfect tonight if my memory did not continue to return to unsettling images from an earlier meeting at church.  Images and stories so haunting, I cannot sit without burden.  My ears have heard and my eyes have seen the testimony of what is our modern day slave trade.

Presented today were stories from foreign lands and remote islands of orphaned people and squalor. Young girls weeping from inside the walls of a brothel. Forgotten and missing women and children as young as nine and ten, sold and violated, imprisoned and abused.  Not only in places where garbage piles high but in locations as close and clean as our Magnificent Mile.   Girls the same ages as my own daughters.  As my own daughters...

The anger that sears through me to consider how man twists the beauty of children and women for his own greed and another's pleasure brings me close to vomit.  Foolish men unaware they are merely minions of evil and part of a much larger plan. 

How close the danger lies while we sit on our hands consumed by our own minutiae.  Our self-involved preoccupation is all with which we are familiar.  Yet to truly find Christ is to truly lose ourselves.  Instead, we wail and whimper about the smallest of infractions done unto us.   We deliberate the conversion from a Blackberry to an iPhone with such significance but fail to examine the monumental injustice caused to human beings both near and far.  We dare not even mutter the words that reflect such suffering.  Words unacceptable for our social settings.  It could make things awkward.  I don't want to think about it either.  Thinking about this, well, frankly, it makes me feel dirty.  Dirty and helpless.

Some believe there is not much we can do.  Others believe our efforts will be too minuscule to bother.  We don't have time and our energy is fleeting.  Life is too much.  It is too much to do any more than survive because many of us truly don't live life.  Life lives us.  I know.  I feel the same. 

How could we ever possibly take control and make the movement that makes us something more than bystanders to incredulous and horrific acts?

My kids are too young

I am too old

Not enough time

Not the right season of life

Not my calling

We are lost.  Our priorities askew.  Over-scheduled, superficial lives make us the fools merely being used for a much larger plan.  I am reminded of the words of Edmund Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

There are slaves among us. Forgotten souls who need a lamp to light the path to redemption. Who will whisper the sweet words they need to hear? You are loved.  You are beautiful. You are worth more than you know.

This is what will prevent me from an easy sleep tonight.  What is it that I can do? Perhaps it is something else that stirs in you.  There are the terrorized, but there are also the hungry, the sick and the poor.  We cannot do everything but we are all called to something. 

We can all do something.  If not us, then who?

She Is Safe 

World Vision