Patong, Thailand…
Wow, to be honest I don’t even know where to start. This month was amazing, hard, heart breaking, tiring, and victorious!
It was a month of war…not the type of war you might think, but a battle for souls, a battle in the Spiritual realm…battle for life and death
-war for the lives of prostitutes, stuck in a mindset that they must sell their bodies in order to provide for their families.
– war for the men who pay for these women, the families they have back home, the wives being betrayed, the brokenness that requires them to pay for sex
– war for lady boys…fighting for their identity and changing all they can in order to fit the mold “they believe” is them
But war has victories doesn’t it and if you know me, you know I love to win! I love to see the God who created each of those men and women rejoicing and claiming them as His own, and that is exactly what he did!
I saw God fight for his people, I saw him speak clearly and boldly through teammates and I saw freedom become a reality for so many in bondage.
I have so many stories but I’ll try to keep focused so you will actually read this!
First, I will introduce to you Ice...
She is 20 years old, has a 1 year old baby boy, and has been working in the bars of Patong for 5 months now. She works at a bar called “Bad Girls Bar”
My first night in the bars, I see her bar name and say, “These girls won’t be Bad girls anymore! They will be good girls who know Jesus.” So I walked up to the counter and met them. She was the 2nd girl I met that night. She was so precious, sweet, opposite of what I expected. She had a cute summer dress on but you could see it in her eyes that she didn’t want to be slutty, or seen by the men only looking at her with lust.
That first night we become friends, we played Jinga…
and every night we went to the bars we stopped by her bar… we learned about her son, her job, her customers, her boss, and her desire for a way out of this hole she stepped in.
we invited her for lunch, she didn’t answer her phone…we invited her again, she slept in…then again…sick…frustrated but not defeated we still had hope and kept visiting her bar, praying and begging her to…little did we know what our efforts and prayers were about to do…
