a gathering of broken people

You might be wondering what I mean by that and who are these broken souls. 

This month my team and I are working with a ministry focused on the intervention side of the sex traffic industry. We are going out to the bars during their peak hours and building relationships with the girls in the bars who have set themselves up to be bought and sold for the profit of others or even their own way of financial means.

We are meeting with prostitutes and lady boys. 

We are loving those who are unseen, unheard and truly unloved. 

It might sound intimidating, scary or even pointless. Sometimes we can go into these situations defeated. Believing the lie, that I can not change anything. I can not provide for their financial needs, get them another job or make them believe they are worth more than what they are believing.  But really these are lies.

The truth is that the Lord calls us to go into the dark to shed His light. 

To love the prostitute, the lady boy and the oppressor. The men who are preying on these young women for their own desires of love and the need to be seen.

This scene, the whole bar situation is truly a gathering of broken people. 

All searching for something bigger than themselves. All searching for fulfillment, identity, love.  Something to make them whole, someone to know them. 

So this is our part, the responsibility the Lord has blessed us with this month: to love. To come against brokenness with the truth of where wholeness can be found. Of where their hope and identity comes from, the blessing that is Jesus Christ and the redemption that is found in what He did for all of us on the cross. The truth that He died for even me and the lady boy and the prostitute. The beauty of our Lord, Jesus is that He does not even see their sin. He does not see a prostitute or a lady boy. He sees straight to the heart through the brokenness into His child who is searching and hurting and looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places. His heart breaks for His children and so does mine. 

I have been blessed by the relationships that are being built, by what the Lord is doing in the midst of darkness and chaos. I know in my heart that He loves these girls, He loves the men and since He does, I do. Or at least I ask for His heart and strength to love when I can not do it on my own.

I thank the Lord for His eyes and His heart in this situation. I thank Him for His grace and redemption that I am blessed with and that He is just waiting to give to His children here in Chiang Mai. What a blessing it is to know that even in the midst of the brokenness, Christ is there waiting and ready to give abundantly to His children.

So here is my prayer request: I ask that you would pray for bar street in Chiang Mai, that the Lord will continue to open up the hearts of His heart broken children. That their hearts will be open to His pursuit on their lives. 

That He will move them out of being defined as a gathering of broken people and into a definition of being whole and redeemed in Him.