What an amazing weekend!
Some of the details will have to wait for another post, but I was so privileged to go and tour a completed and running safe house for girls rescued from trafficking. It is the only Christian safe house in the state of Florida. And while I was humbled at the dedication it takes to run the house, I was also overwhelmed by its simplicity.
You see, this wasn’t a huge home. It was pretty average. And they didn’t have ten and twenty girls. They had two, with room for five. And these two houseparents were not specialists trained for trafficking. They were parents who answered the call to love on two girls in a radical, unconditional way. The overwhelming part was this: it was all so doable.
And yet there is only one Christian safe house in the state of Florida.
This has got to change, and you and I are the ones who have to change it.
Later in the weekend David and I were at a weekend retreat sponsored by the Luis Palau Association. If you don’t know who Luis Palau is, click this link or google his name. We heard so much over the course of the weekend that confirmed what God was saying. This is our job to do, and so we need to prepare.
Luis was speaking on Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his son. True worship, he said, involves sacrifice. We are called into the world to tell others that Jesus loves them more than they could imagine, more than they’ve been told. He loves them so much, that nothing they have done could keep him from heaping even more love on top of them. He loves.
But for someone to hear that message, others must sacrifice. As Luis said, “Someone must pay the price. Someone must sacrifice to do the work.”
My mind flashed to the safe house.
I don’t know what it is going to look like yet, but that someone is me. That someone is you. These girls need a place to heal and be restored.
This is our sacrifice.
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Preach it sista! This is truth! What an amazing thing to take part in, sometimes all that is needed for healing is LOVE, and God’s LOVE is the most encompassing, unconditional, unfathomable, incredible LOVE there is and to be able to share this with the broken is an amazing and remarkable quest that we are all called to take part in! What God is going to be able to do through people like you who are willing to answer the call is awesome!!! Way to go, I pray he will make a way for you to accomplish this goal. Thanks for being such an encouragement.
Kate, thank you for encouraging me! A month later, now, I’m still humbled by what ordinary, unexceptional but yielded people can accomplish. Each one doing their own part and no more.