At home, I've become known as the 'abolitionist' or 'the girl who is fighting human trafficking' etc. So naturally, coming on this trip many people, including myself, had the expectation that God's intention for bringing my team and me to Thailand was to set the captives free.
It didn't take us long into this trip to see that we were wrong this was not at ALL God's plan for any of us.
In fact, I was wrong about a lot of things on this trip. One thing that I was very wrong about was the women and men at Bangla. I came expecting to be working with trafficked victims. Meaning that they were forced or coerced into a life of sexual slavery. I expected many of them to be young girls.
The reality? A lot of the women are older and have kids. Some are even married. They choose to come work in the bars and sell themselves because in Thai culture this is deemed normal & if they have any chance of providing for their kids, they feel forced to sell their bodies. It is so completely and utterly heart wrenching when one of the women shows us a picture of their precious baby, as her eyes swell with tears, telling us that the baby lives with it’s grandparents so that she can continue working.
Now, don’t get me wrong. God is absolutely moving in this country and He is using us to speak life and show love to the women at Bangla. But we’ve realized that His plan is way different (way better) than ours.
You see, God didn’t bring me here to set the captives free. He brought me here to set ME free from the things holding me captive.
He’s setting me free from the lies I’ve believed about myself for my entire life and speaking His truth over me. He’s setting me free from doubt and letting me see how much I really do hear His voice. He’s setting me free from anxiety and showing me that He’s got things in His hands and that I don’t have to fret. And He’s setting me free from my own thoughts and the things I tell myself that I am.
Yes, it’s messy. Yes, I’m reliving a lot of crap and lies that I’ve been told because I stuffed them down rather than handing them to Him. Yes, the enemy is using this new freedom to attack even more. Yes, it’s a growing process and it doesn’t happen over night, but it is so, so worth it.
In the midst of letting go of some of these lies one night, God reminded me of the farms in my town. There are a couple of weeks every spring where my whole town smells like crap because they’re planting in the fields. The farmers use manure to fertilize the crops. But every summer you see the corn, wheat and soybeans, starting to grow and you realize how those couple weeks of crap smell were well worth it because now those crops can be used to make multiple things that we consume on a daily basis.
Same with the stuff He’s set me free from. I had to go through a ton of crap and be told a ton of lies that I believed. But it was well worth it, because now that He’s set me free, God will use me in multiple ways to bring freedom to other people. And I’m ready to be sent into the world.
