Cry. That was all I could do when I found out the tragic news.
It has only been a month since my spent time with the women working in the Red Light District of Chiang Mai. It has only been a month since I laughed uncontrollably with my dear friend Mai (also known by Minnie) over jokes in broken English.
My spirit was drawn to her like a magnet every time I walked through the musky row of bars.
Some nights, I would buy her a drink and she would hold my hand while we sat and talked like old friends. Other nights, she would be busy with a costumer, but would always make sure to wave and muster up a smile.
There was something about her smile that got to me. And an innocence behind her eyes. Like a little girl dressed up in her mothers heels pretending to be all grown up. Pretending to be something she wasn’t.
Her story was similar to so many of the women. She was from a small village and had come to the big city to make money to send back to her family. The hope of prosperity and a chance at finding love trapped her in a world of darkness drenched in perversion and violence.
The reality of the evil in this world is something so many of us seem to avoid thinking about entirely. I myself am guilty of this. It’s too cold. It’s too scary. We’re afraid of what we could feel if we actually let ourselves resonate about it. So we tell ourselves that someone else out there surely has to be doing something about it and we turn our heads the other way.
My sweet, dear friend Mai was discovered dead on the bathroom floor of a hotel room during the madness of the Thai new year. She was rapped and sodomized so brutally that a glass bottle was found left inside of her abdomen.
This time I can’t turn my head. It hurts the deepest parts of me. Her adorable face is still so fresh in my mind.
I am honestly still trying to process the heartbreak and the answers to the questions that keep running through my mind. What do you do when your friend is viciously murdered? How do you move on? How do you not blame God? How do we stop things like this from happening?
The only thing I can do now is fall. Fall at the feet of the Father and hold tightly to the truths I know about Him.
- Our God loves us beyond our understanding and is fighting for us in the most noble ways.
- Our God will bring justice. That is not on our plates. We are called to love and be loved by Him.
- Our God has a heavenly perspective we cannot conceive. It’s hard to see beyond pain and suffering, but great strength and purpose can be found out of great sorrow.
- Our God’s light can and will overcome any darkness.
- Our God is screaming for a deeper relationship with us. Sadly, it often takes the hardest moments in life in order for us to acknowledge how much we need Him.
- Our God works all things together for the good of those who love Him. (Romans 8:28)
- Our God hears our prayers and longs to be our comforter.
- Our God is real and our lives here on Earth are so short.
It’s time to step up, surrender, and start living up to our small, but important roles in this beautiful love story. We are called to be His vessels here on Earth and to respond to the needs we see, right now. What are we waiting for?
“Mackenzie.” It was the voice of Papa again, especially gentle and tender. “You really don’t understand yet. You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through the tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self- centeredness, and power and believing you are on your own and insignificant. All of these thoughts contain powerful lies. You see pain and death as ultimate evils and God as the ultimate betrayer, or perhaps, at best, as fundamentally untrustworthy. You dictate the terms and judge my actions and find me guilty. The real underlying flaw in your life, Mackenzie, is that you don’t think I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything— the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives— is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me. But you don’t.”
“I don’t?” asked Mack, but it was not really a question. It was a statement of fact, and he knew it.
“Mackenzie, trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me.”
Excerpt from “The Shack”
