Ever feel like you’re engaging in futility?
My friend Mike and I talked last week about 25 kids at the HOME OF HOPE and the enormity of the human trafficking issue. The numbers alone can be staggering—nearly thirty million humans living in modern-day slavery, more than 100,000 U.S children trafficked into prostitution every year, second-largest worldwide organized crime activity.
It’s easy to feel like our puny efforts are futile in the face of numbers like that. I told Mike a story from last year’s tour that helps me keep those numbers in perspective.
We were invited by a host church to a neighborhood block party. It was a great time—burgers, bouncy houses, and what seemed like several hundred kids running everywhere. I remember sitting there watching all those kids and thinking about the rescued children at the HOME OF HOPE. An image occurred to me.
I wondered what would happen if a mom walked up and said her child was missing. What would we all do?
The answer, of course, was obvious. The party would stop. Everyone would drop everything. We’d all do whatever we could to find that child.
Why? It’s just one kid, and there were hundreds of them running all over the place. Why interrupt everybody’s fun over one lost kid?
Because every single child is precious. Jesus talked about this when He taught the parable of the lost sheep. And it struck me that evening at the party that if one child is priceless in God’s eyes, then those kids at the HOME OF HOPE were priceless times 25. They’re not 25 throwaway lives. They’re worthy of whatever sweat and sacrifice it takes to keep them safe, because it’s what we can do.
Our team won’t solve the human trafficking problem. Fixing the world is God’s job, not ours.
But we can make a difference, and so can you.
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