Yesterday I wrote about my friend Josh.
I asked us to walk in the other guy’s shoes, and you may wonder how that relates to a bike ride. After all, we’re rolling, not walking, and what does Josh’s story of addiction rehab have to do with human trafficking?
Earlier this week I spoke with a guy who operates a home for girls who’ve been rescued from trafficking. He told us some of these kids were first sold at the age of six–by their mothers. This isn’t happening in some third-world country, it’s right here in the U. S.
How does a mother make that choice? To me, it must be a person who’s perceiving a world different from the one I see. In my world, the choice to prostitute your six-year-old daughter simply isn’t an option.
But in her world, it is. That’s a problem, and yelling at it won’t solve it.
As another example, the most common question asked of rescued victims is, “Why didn’t you run away?”
From the perspective of one who’s never been enslaved, who’s never been abused or betrayed by law enforcement or had their family threatened, it’s a logical question. We don’t see the invisible chains, but they’re real and powerful.
If we care, we must try to understand why she stayed. As we walk in those difficult shoes and comprehend some of the pain, perhaps we can understand our own brokenness as well.
Josh doesn’t need me to fix him. I’m not in some better class of sinner than he is. We need each other, and in that relationship we can both grow and learn and get to know Jesus a little better.
We all walk through this world in different shoes, and we’re all broken. Me, you, that little prostituted girl, and the mom who sold her. We all need to be reconciled. We all need Jesus’ saving grace.
This isn’t about making excuses. It’s about reconciliation. The only way to break this cycle is to reconcile what’s broken, and we can’t resolve what we don’t understand.
We have to walk in the other guy’s shoes.
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