Here in Thailand!
Truly loving this country. A beautiful city surrounded by mountains, smiles, and lots of Pad Thai (praise). As some of you may know my team and I got assigned to do bar ministry in the Red Light District of Chiang Mai. The organization I get to be a part of is called Lighthouse in Action, an incredible and passionate organization that fights sex trafficking in three different ways.
Slum ministry and monk chats – an opportunity to stop sex trafficking from its roots, meeting and loving on kids of the slums in hopes that they are not taken away to be trafficked. Monk chats involve getting to meet with Monks of Chiang Mai and befriending them.
Zion Café – an incredible space where delicious food and coffee is made started by the founder of Lighthouse in Action in an effort to offer stable jobs and daily support to girls who make the decision to leave the bars. (we get to sleep next door and get breakfast and lunch at the café, quite the treat!)
Love Acts (bar ministry) – befriending the girls at the bars in the Red Light District. Daily prayer walks over the streets and bars where we witness greed, pride, and money consume people’s lives.
With these short descriptions you can get a glimpse into our days. My team was prayerfully placed into bar ministry. My heart sank when I heard the news – walking up to girls at bars who are searching for clients all night so they can have an economically better life…my thought was “they’ll want nothing to do with me, I’m the last person they want to talk to”.
So wrong.
As we boldly sit at bars, order sprites, and strike up conversations with these girls, sometimes tourists, sometimes owners of bars, they’re dying to tell you about their life! Our stories are meant to be shared, our lives are meant to be experienced by others, and our mission as believers is to ask. To place the situation they are in and that we are in aside, and genuinely care about the precious girl sitting before us excited to share the greatest gift we could, the grace shown to us so that they may live again.
Friends, this month has been hard, a month in which the Lord has revealed so much to me through challenges. He has opened my eyes to my own temptation and the guilt that I feel when I am tempted in any way. I ask myself why I’m having these thoughts, feelings, emotions – I’m a terrible person – wrong again. It’s my human nature. I was led to this:
“For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” – Hebrews 2:16-18
You know that feeling when you sit one on one with someone and they tell you a story that you have basically lived out in your own life? You know the relief you feel when you know someone else has struggled with the same things as you? It feels like the weight is lifted off your shoulders and your not the worst person in the world, and you can share in this struggle.
I praise Jesus for this perspective.
To know that our savior was tempted just as much as we are tempted.
For realizing that he suffered through the temptation.
For being given the gift to know what grace is truly about.
It is not about how terrible of a person I am for being tempted; it is about how near Jesus is to me in my temptation and looking to him when it happens.
These girls at bars…they don’t have that. They’ve never been told about this relief that awaits them.They don’t get to turn to Him, because they don’t know He’s there!
“but where sin increased, grace increased all the more,so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” – Romans 5:20-21
My friends at the bars are tempted. I, a world racer, am tempted just as they are. I hold in my hands the gift of grace – we need to tell them. It is not the grace that I can offer them in a conversation it is the grace that I search for everyday so that I am not tempted and so that sin may be put the death.
I need this grace today just as they need it today. today I choose to suffer through the temptation so that grace may be increased and reign through righteousness with the security that I am not alone and that Christ knows exactly how I feel, He just asks us to embrace it with Him.
what would the Red Light District look like if people chose to suffer through the temptation, embrace it, look to Christ, and accept grace.
until our next coffee date,
ana maria.
