Go Beyond

Houston en route to Dubai

This past week I visited with a friend who spent a year working for an organization that champions the rights of those trapped in the dark world of human slavery. We first met in South Asia where he was working to help effect the rescue of young girls living in a hell created by evil individuals motivated by greed. He shared an amazing story with me that reminded me of how the power of love can trump the of hand of evil. What follows is the gist of his story.

During his initial months on the field he took part in an operation to rescue some girls from a brothel outside a large city. This initial operation was unsuccessful because the brothel owners were tipped off by corrupt individuals within the police department that was assisting with the rescue operation. So, they planned another rescue attempt several weeks later and, once again, someone tipped off the brothel owner. A third rescue attempt weeks after that also failed for the same reason. My friend shared with me how demoralized he was after the third failed rescue attempt. It seemed that everything was working against them, including individuals in the police department who were in cahoots with the brothel owners.

Sometime after the third failed rescue attempt, my friend saw a photo of the brothel on the front page of the newspaper. The related story was about a girl who had been trafficked to work at that brothel. The young girl said that a man from her distant village had come to the brothel for sexual services. She recognized the man and asked him if he would carry a note to her grandfather explaining what had happened to her and that she needed help. The man agreed. When the grandfather received the note he sold all that he had in order to travel to the place where his granddaughter was enslaved. He posed as a customer and later escaped with his granddaughter in the night. He then went to the police station and reported to them all that had happened to his granddaughter. The police had no choice but to arrest the brothel owners and shut down the operation. And, the police department came under investigation in an attempt to find the individuals responsible for having foiled the previous rescue attempts.

My friend said that he learned an important lesson. He had traveled to South Asia to be a champion for the oppressed. But, when all three attempts to rescue the girls at the brothel had failed, God raised up an unlikely champion — the grandfather of one of the girls who had been trafficked. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Indeed, it does. Those who trafficked the young girl never counted on the surpassing power of a grandfather’s love, a love that was willing to sell everything in order to redeem something of infinitely greater value — a granddaughter. Those of us who live in comfort and security must do no less on behalf of those living in bondage. May each of us be willing to become God’s unlikely champions to at least one of the twenty-seven million individuals on the planet today who live in some form of slavery.