Passing the Victorious Torch

The team leader of “Crash of Love” (the other team we’re working with this month), Dustin Suttle, said something the other night when we were all debriefing after bar ministry. He said that we have been given the opportunity to be apart of something so much bigger than ourselves and that we can claim each other’s victories as our own victories. In this epic battle that the Lord has already won on Bangla Road, we have all been chosen by God to be apart of His army of disciples, carrying each others burdens and sharing in each others triumphs. Our two teams have had many triumphs this month. A few woman have left the bars because of our relationships with them, a few of them are beginning to come to the English and hotel management classes our ministry offers and countless women have been loved on and given information on our ministry and other career options they can have. Praise God for those women and their stories. But we do not just celebrate our stories, but the stories of those who have gone before us and those who will continue after we are gone to Malaysia next month.

The World Race January 2011 squad was here during the month of January (what a country to start the Race) and we got to spend a couple nights with them before they left Thailand for Cambodia. Their two teams took us out on our first night on Bangla Road to “show us the ropes” and helped us along as we met women they had began relationships with. We heard stories of difficulties and success along each “Soi” and bar we passed, what women to maintain ongoing relationships with and which women to occasionally check up on. One wonderful victory for the January squad was over “Soi Lion” which no longer exists. Soi Loin was one of the oldest road of bars on Bangla and it was recently torn down. For the time being, there have been shops and food stands down Soi Lion day and night for the tourists, and the January squad had prayed every day for the market to become permanent. They prayed that no bars would be built up on that road and that it would forever stay a shopping market. We have seen in our past month of doing ministry on Bangla that the market has become more and more stable and thriving. As of right now there are no plans to rebuild that road into a “Soi” for bars because the market is doing so well economically. That is a victory for the January squad that we share! As Dustin put it, it’s like we’re all “passing the torch” from team to team and each person does their part for the month or so that they’re on Bangla and then passes it to another disciple of Christ to continue spreading God’s love and doing His work.

AIM has a shorter mission trip called “Real Life” for college-age adults and there is a Real Life team staying at the ministry base with us along with a team from WYAM Kona and as of yesterday, the WR: Human Trafficking Edition women (INCLUDING MY LOVELY FRIEND, NATASHA HURT). That is a lot of people coming together for a single purpose: to shine Christ’s light in the darkness of Bangla Road and to show women in the bars how priceless they are in the eyes of their Heavenly Father. Some of the Real Life girls were walking down Bangla the other night during bar ministry and one of them stopped to look up at the sky and right at that moment they were approached by a man who was a bar owner on one of the “Soi”s on Bangla. He told them (not realizing that they were working to close his bar and the rest of the bars there) that the strangest thing started happening about five years ago. For ten years, his bar was booming and there were always tons of women that came to work at his bar because there were so many customers and so much demand for alcohol and sex. But five years ago there was a significant decrease in customers, women, and business started fading to where a lot of his bar owner friends have gone out of business and have been forced to sell their bars. He says business continues to go downhill and he still doesn’t understand why so many women have been leaving the sex industry.