As you know, I think a good deal about the kids we’re privileged to serve.
I’ve listened to a number of their stories, and even in the sanitized, finished-product versions, it’s not difficult to recognize their struggle to feel good enough. To feel like their past makes them somehow unclean or unacceptable.
Honestly, it makes sense when so much of society treats them exactly that way. Whether it’s our 22 kids (and their mothers) specifically or trafficked people in general, so many folks just can’t get past the idea that they’re responsible for their circumstances. That somehow, if they had made better choices, they wouldn’t have ended up being abused.
In their view, trafficking victims will always be a bit less than.
As followers of Jesus, we don’t get the option of looking at people through that lens.
We all know Jesus welcomed outcasts, the folks on the margins, people who were unclean or unacceptable by cultural standards. The poor, the immigrants, the sick.
But, as I said in yesterday’s quote, it’s important to understand why.
He didn’t do it to clean them up and make them presentable. He did it to show that, in God’s eyes, they had always been that way.
I think about our kids, about how they would be treated if somehow they ended up in my town – or yours. Welcomed? Rejected? Deported? Imprisoned?
Jesus wrapped his arms around those society wanted nothing to do with. He said, pretty clearly, that if we wanted to look for him, we would find him among the hungry, the thirsty, those in tattered clothes, the prisoner. The folks we’d rather keep out of our neighborhoods.
He also said, pretty clearly, that rejecting these folks was rejecting him.