Feeling Small

These last couple of weeks have been really good, but also challenging. We have been doing a lot of the same things: going to orphanages, praying in markets, going to an “Old Folks Home”, and doing church programs. However, we have also been doing a lot more prostitute ministry. This is one of the hardest things to do, but it has been so eye opening.

We have gone to bars at night and talked to girls right as they are starting their shifts. We bring them gifts, like flowers and cookies, to let them know that they are treasured. We also go to them during the day. Most of them live above the bars, so they are just hanging out in the bars and getting ready for the night. When we do this we have a better time to make relationships and pray for them.

Talking with these girls breaks my heart. We’ve been in bars where you can tell that the girls there are trafficked. We can’t stay very long in these bars, but it’s long enough to look into the eyes of a few girls and see the overwhelming sadness and brokenness.  Some of the girls we have talked to instantly tear up as soon as you start asking them about their families or how long they have worked there.  I know that I have been allowed to be in places that most people will never go. As hard as it is to be in these places, I feel like these are the kind of places that the body of Christ needs to be the most. Filling the places of darkness with light.

God has also been helping me realize how I continuously need to work on making myself be “less.” Not in the way that I should strive for less, but I should instead strive to focus on God’s greatness and His glory, not my own. I think that God brings us to places and puts us in situations that we are overwhelmed by, not to torture us, but so we start to realize how small we really are. There’s no way I can go out and change the whole world and all the injustice in it. I mean, I think it would be a big step to even change one person’s life. Sometimes, we think we need to seek after these great things: feeding the hungry, rescuing the enslaved, and so on, but when we try to do these things on our own, we’re just going to fail. God has been showing me that He is the strength in my weaknesses. In fact, the more weaknesses that you have, or at least the more that you acknowledge, the more that God’s glory can be shown through you.