What upsets you? What should?

I like to think of myself as a fairly even-keel person. Nothing really gets to me, one way or another. I don't get overly excited about anything and I don't get overly outraged. It doesn't take much to make me laugh. It takes a little bit more to make me cry. My skin is pretty thick. My heart is fairly protected. My mind is typically all over the place.

Sure, I can get annoyed easily. In fact, just as I sat down to write this blog, I've been annoyed at my dogs chomping their food and their clickity clack nails pacing on the kitchen floor. I get impatient with being interrupted or having my ideas shot down. My husband just made fun of my morning hair. I'm okay with that. Happy to be nappy, is the way I've always seen that...I do get annoyed a little bit. But there's one thing that infuriates me, one that continues to sink my heart and boil my blood and that is the abuse of innocence.

I suppose a lot of it comes from a personal past experience that is mostly silenced but unexpectedly awakens within me from time to time. With the recent Penn State scandal and hearing people react and support people in high positions that could have spoken up to stop it, it sickens me. It tempts me to believe that, for the most part, people don't want to hear the truth from victims. Perhaps it's too much for them to believe. When the guilty verdict came out against Sandusky, I remember reading it in bed from my phone and tears would not stop falling. Justice, perhaps. But more than that, the country listened to the pain of the victims, they believed them and they collectively stood against it.

As much as that entire scandal upset me, it upsets me even more to know that it's not an isolated case. This robbery of innocence, this assault on the most precious part of a person, the abuse of power and the subtly intentional tactics of fear and control, happens EVERY single day. Not just at Penn State, but here, all over, in America. All over the world. No single state, no single country or town or village is immune to it. None.

Last night, I read a blog from a friend of mine, someone who has been in the fields personally, someone who has been a part of undercover operations and missions that directly impact the preservation and restoration of these innocent human souls that have tasted the breath of hell. To be able to read, firsthand from him, an experience of being face to face with a trafficker and the trafficked, the perpetrator and the victim, was unsettling for me. As if it wasn't real enough to me already, I felt like I was there, watching it happen, as I read his blog. And I couldn't help but find myself so incredibly thankful for him, for people like him, who have put their lives on the line to find justice because they care more for the preservation and protection of a human life than preventing a scandal or maintaining a platform of supposed football excellence.

I really encourage any of you, whether you have a heart for human trafficking or not, to take a couple of minutes and actually read his blog, the story that he told from his own experience in Cambodia. Sign up to follow it, read it whenever you can, pray. And then pray some more. Pray for the people in the field, for the victims, for the brothel owners, for those trafficking, for the people who are in a position to do something and may be standing silent, for the voice of innocence to be heard and believed and acted upon.  Click the following link to directly access his blog: https://globalsentrygroup.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/a-hole-in-the-wall/

No Human-Trafficking Awareness Month?

I am admittedly a little bit annoyed and let me dive right in and tell you why. As most people close to me know, I am very passionate about the issue of sex-trafficking prevention. To me, sex-trafficking is one of the most heinous, deplorable crimes because of all the factors that play into it: kidnapping, rape, deceit, fraud, bribery and sometimes murder. As if that isn't enough, young and innocent girls are often the victims, girls as young as 6 years old. It is illegal everywhere, but it happens anyway. And most people, if they don't know about it, don't want to talk about it.

I was exploring something on the internet today with this in mind. Everything seems to have an "Awareness Month" these days. When I was looking over all the different months, I found things as silly as Pet Dental Month, Lawn Care Month, Hamburger Month, Soul Food Month and Peanut Butter Lovers Month (the last one obviously being one I plan to celebrate in it's entirety). Sex-trafficking Awareness Month...nowhere to be found.

Unless there are more sources out there than my very extensive online research gave me (that being the first and only "hit" I checked out), I cannot find anything even closely resembling a sex-trafficking awareness month. So, this is why I'm annoyed. I started to realize how caught up we get with inconsequential things in our society. I really don't care what Brad and Angelina are fighting about now or what the stars look like without their makeup on. Okay, maybe that's only half true. But to have nothing about human-trafficking? NOTHING? Twenty-eight million people are enslaved today, more than ANY time in history, and the majority of it is either slave labor or forced sexual servitude.

This is a child's issue, a man's issue, a woman's issue and it should be EVERYONE'S issue, whether it is simply and soley just to pray for the issue. An issue like this that is so darkly and intricately woven into the threads of a society and culture can only be broken by the power of intentional prayer. I believe that very firmly. But is must, it MUST, first have awareness of what it really is!

Paul and I, together with Tiny Hands International, have created a prayer initiative specifically for this reason. The initiative is called "One Girl". It is a spiritual and prayerful commitment to uphold sex-trafficking prevention up in prayer. Daily, you commit yourself to pray for one girl, whether it is a girl vulnerable to being trafficked, already across those borders, being sold into a brothel or one who has been discarded into the streets as a useless because of HIV. You can pray for a brothel owner, a man entering the brothel, the parent's who unknowingly sell their daughters into this life thinking they are giving them a hope for a better future in education and employment. The bottom line is, we need prayer warriors to bring this issue into the light of reality for people, one girl at a time.

Since May, Tiny Hands International has had a hand in intercepting over 400 girls at the border monitoring stations between Nepal and India. But whether it was 400 girls or just one girl, it was a life that was saved from this unthinkable atrocity. So whether or not we have the backing of an official month of awareness, we ARE going to get sex-trafficking prevention into the forefront of people's minds.