Monthly Archives: October 2012

What Will I Say?

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As I write this, I’m sitting on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. It’s 3:37am and I can’t sleep much. My perfectly spaced 19 inches from the chair in front of me feels like 1.9 inches. My legs are cramped. My neck hurts from straining to read my book because the overhead light is too dim. My wife is sitting next to me, restless and fading in and out of consciousness with the 4 inch pillow given to her. I’m hungry and need to pee, but don’t want to wake the dude next to me who seems quite comfortable taking up 1.7 of my 1.9 inches of leg room.

But none of this is what keeps me awake.

It’s the girls.

The girls I’m going to meet tomorrow.

Girls who have lived a life I cannot image…nor possibly understand.

A life of torture.
Pain.
Loneliness.

A life of slavery. Slavery like you’ve never seen before. Not slavery like American slavery of whites enslaving blacks that we’ve all read about in history class or slavery like we’ve seen in the movies.

Sexual slavery. Sex-trafficking. Human trafficking. Child trafficking.

This is what keeps me up at night. Not just now on this plane, but on other nights before this. It’s an adventure I never thought I would embark on. Brandy and I first learned about sex-trafficking and it’s 27 million slaves two years ago while reading about Hopechest CEO Tom Davis and blogger Anne Jackson taking a trip to Moldova to learn more themselves and expose one of the dirtiest secrets of man. You can read more about trafficking in Moldova here….. Since then, our lives seem to keep intersecting with this underworld of trafficking. Reading books, blogs, meeting Tom Davis and working with Children’s Hopechest has seemed to become a regular part of our lives….a small part, but a regular part.

So here I am, two years later…heading to Moldova with my wife…to learn about it first-hand ourselves.

And to meet the girls…

What will I say when I meet them?

These are girls who have been tricked, beaten, threatened, starved, raped, drugged, raped some more…
They experienced the worst from humanity and from…men. What does a ‘man’ say to that?

I’m not sure what we’ll see or hear or experience. I’m not sure how many girls we’ll meet or whether we’ll learn much detail of their stories. Who would want to talk about their past sexual enslavement where they were forced to service up to 30 men per day? And do I really want to know the details of their story? How much can I tolerate hearing about the evil my fellow man has brought on these innocent girls? Perhaps this is why sex-trafficking is so widespread…nobody wants to hear it.

So nobody talks about it.
So it goes on.

The girls I will be meeting have been rescued…physically at least, from their enslavement.
Rescued from their torture.
Rescued from their abuse.
Rescued from their horror.
Rescued from the men that treated them as dirt, as objects, as a product, as a tool.
These girls survived the daily torment that most people cannot possibly comprehend.

But can one be rescued mentally and emotionally from such experiences?

I believe that one can be…rescued from inside. But only by the grace and love of God. And this is what I want to see and experience and learn…and help with.

So here I am…sitting on a cramped plane on my way to Moldova…waiting with anticipation. And fear. And wonder. And hope.

And wondering…what will I say?

Abstract Ramblings

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I’d like to start a blog.
I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a long time. I thought about it, then thought about it some more…never moving beyond that thought. I couldn’t think of a name. Didn’t know what I would blog about. {checking twitter for blog posts} What do I have to offer the world that hasn’t already been written, blogged, tweeted, Facebooked, printed or otherwise over-communicated. {checking twitter for #overcommunicated stories}
So I thought about it some more. {checking twitter}

I’d like to start a blog.
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.
And so goes my problem…

{checking twitter for missed tweets}

Then one day, as I was {checking twitter}, I realized it was nothing but a bunch of abstract ideas, thoughts, comments and regurgitated quotes from famous dead people I had never heard of. My wife sometimes reminds me that I can become quite distracted by the seemingly random tweets of others. I would laugh out loud and promptly repeat someone else’s humor to her as if she really needed to know what the infamous person who I’ve never met and only has 37 followers said about the guy who was bitten by the snake at the zoo which is 1300 miles away in a city neither of us has ever heard of. Random indeed. Random and abstract.

I’d like to start a blog. {checking twitter for #abstract}
Someday. What should I name it?
Let me check twitter. {checking twitter for unique blog names that haven’t been used}

My friend and coworker once told me that I tend to ramble when trying too hard to communicate a point I’m passionate about. Scratch that…
My coworker once told me that I tend to ramble when trying too hard to communicate a point I’m passionate about. Ramble? Me? {checking twitter for #rambling} I argued against her obvious misunderstand of a good communicator until she brought to my attention that I had been rambling on about me not rambling for five minutes. Friend fail. {checking twitter for hashtags of #friendfail}

I’m also looking for new friends.
{checking twitter for #newfriends}

After some thorough thought (about 8.3 seconds), I realized I do often ramble about abstract things. A lot. {checking twitter for #alot}

{checking twitter again for #alot}

So I’ve been thinking of starting a blog.
All I have in my head is a bunch of abstract ramblings. Things I think about…but not sure if I can say out loud. Or should say out loud. Or write about. Or quite possibly should even be thinking about. Am I rambling? {checking twitter for new updates on #rambling}

So here it is. Abstract Ramblings…things I write about…which may be kinda…abstract. And I might kinda ramble. I’m not sure how often I’ll post, what I’ll post, or even how long I’ll keep this up.

Or whether I’ll write something that will get me in trouble. Or arrested. {checking twitter for #tweetsthatgotmearrested}

Or make my wife mad at me. Or my kids picked on at the neighborhood park.

{checking twitter for #kidsthatgotpickedonbecausetheirdadwroteanabstractblogandshouldn’thave}

Couldn’t find anything on that one.

So here I am… the abstract rambling.