The bar strip is crowded tonight. We walk past bars full of tourists and locals playing pool and having drinks. The girls and lady boys provocatively lean against the bar and dance to the blaring music. It’s so completely out of my comfort zone so I take a breath and say a prayer before walking into one of the bars.
When doing ministry at the bars it’s easy to have compassion and love for the girls. You see their smiles, hear their stories and you automatically feel for them. You want to love them, you see them with the Father’s eyes. How can you not feel for girls who are forced into the sex industry, forced to sell their bodies and perform every whim of their customer?
When thinking about the men however, many times you get this righteous anger toward them. You ask yourself questions like “How can you look at these girls and see an object for your pleasure and not a human? How is it ok for you to buy a person?”
Mainly you just want to kick them where the sun don’t shine.
So when we were on our prayer walk the first afternoon we were to do bar ministry God laid some heavy and convicting words on my heart.
I am like these men who buy these girls.
They are searching for intimacy and acceptance and love from all the wrong places. They think that sex will fill that lonely part of them that only God can fill. They crave validations from women who were never meant to fill that role.
I too look for fulfillment in things that are not the Father. It may not be sex but its popularity, success, intelligence, religion.
And none of these things will fill the unceasing craving for completeness, for relationship, for identity. I find myself all the time paying for the cheap thrills that the world has to offer and never being satisfied.
And yet God loves me. He heaps grace on me when I don’t deserve it, compassion even when He sees me stray. Despite the fact that I run away toward almost everything else but Him, He still sees me as his precious child.
My sin is no different from those that these men are committing. I am no better than they.
As a follower of Jesus my aim and my desire is to grow to be more like Him every day. Jesus loves me despite my sinful nature. He would love these men as much as He would love the girls.
Which is why as I see them casting lustful looks at the girl with the short skirt or placing his hand dangerously high on the thigh of the woman sitting beside him, I pray that I can see them the way the Lord does. That I can see the hurt and emptiness that they are trying to erase.
That I can love them the way that Jesus loves me.
