As our journey has continued on we have come back to debrief every night with more and more stories of being able to talk into the bar girls about their self worth. This is both exciting and heart wrenching at the same time.
These girls see prostitution as their only way of providing for their families and themselves; and their parents force many of them into it.
Some have been in the bars for the majority of their teenage and young adult life and have developed the idea that their beauty is based on whether or not they have a man with them at the bar.
This realization hit me like a ton of bricks when one of my team members came back telling of a bar girl straight up telling her that she wasn’t pretty because she didn’t have a man wanting her at the bar and we have heard stories of girls telling us of how their boyfriends (frequent customers) say they are too old or too fat.
How twisted is that?
That this place that is seen as the epitome of pleasure by so many is literally breaking down the being of these girls to where their image of themselves is directly correlated with the business of the bar?
If I would have heard this story a month ago I would have been furious at the men that call this a vacation but God is changing my heart like he is many of the women on this team.
As awful and sickening as it is that these men’s pleasures have resulted in lowering the self-esteem of these beautiful Thai women, the men are just as broken as the women they are breaking.
So many of these men walk into the bars alone looking for company and some pretty lady to come boost their self esteem and then they rate themselves on what caliber or what number of bar girl fights for their attention.
Even those that walk in with a hoard of their friends judge themselves in comparison to their friends on the same scale. Bangla road is a cycle of broken people breaking people through their own selfish pursuits for happiness.
This realization can be overwhelming. It is easy to begin to feel defeated by the sheer mass of the road and the people on it and on the flip side to slip into a savior mentality of feeling as if you have to rescue and witness to every person before your time is up and both of these are wrong.
We serve the God of Bangla Road! He made Bangla and the enemy has simply perverted it! The Lord is already fighting the battle for Bangla Road and the souls that inhabit it.
There is a battle raging for the souls on that street that is not a physical one but also is not unseen! Please be in prayer for Bangla Road.
There is victory in the name of the Lord on its way and we get the great opportunity to prepare the way for the risen king that will take back the place and people that he loves!
