When I was a kid I really wanted to be an astronaut. They sky, the stars, the planets and their glory and mystery was something that kept me up at night. I knew that very few people ever went into space if at all – but I would dream and hope for a day when I could discover the mystery for myself.
As someone who’s done a lot of foreign work, the poverty around the world has less of a shock value to me now a days. Don’t get confused. I wish everyone could live with the luxuries that we have in America. But the fact that people live without running water, electricity and things that we seem to find essential just doesn’t surprise me anymore.
We’ve done a lot since being here in Nepal. We get up at 6 am leave the house by 7 to get to the village slums where we either play with the kids or prayer walk. In the afternoons we either go back to the slums or we do street ministry. It’s all Holy Spirit led and I love it. Sometimes days are very exciting. And sometimes you have people telling you to go away over and over again. On Thursday afternoon we did something a little different: Cabin Ministries.
There are these places here in Nepal that are disguised as restaurants that are actually secret brothels for prostitution. As we were asking the Holy Spirit for which one to go to we found ourselves walking down the steps and into this dark ally with our translator. We were seated in the back corner and greeted by 2 young girls. So we bought them a mountain dew, they sat and we began to chat and get to know them praying for the opportunity to strike up a conversation about Jesus.
When we asked them “If you could do anything in the world what would you do?”
Silence.
So we asked again thinking maybe they didn’t understand us.
More silence.
Finally one of the girls responded:
“We will never get to do anything because we will never be educated.”
The other then answered:
“I don’t even have dreams.”
These two girls, one literally not a day over 15 – have no dreams or desires. This is their culture. This is their reality. They live in a society where they aren’t even allowed to dream.
This is the world we live in.
And these are the things my heart now breaks for.
We continued to talk to them and I got to share with them my story. My struggle with alcohol and depression. How I always felt worthless because that’s what people told me I was. How my life felt like it meant nothing until I really met Jesus.
Nepali’s may have freedom from religion now – but there are so many people here who are chained and bound to the Hindu culture out of fear. Who get up every morning and do essentially the same thing that we as followers of Christ do: Pray and worship. But unlike them, our words and our prayers go to the living, breathing, communal God who doesn’t desire anything from us other than what we already are.
This is the God we serve friends.
We serve a God who gives us dreams of hope and a future.
We serve a God who doesn’t see our value in some caste system.
We serve a God who calls us sons and daughters.
We serve a God who knew us before we were even formed in our mother’s womb.
We serve a God who wants us to be set free.
So what is my dream now?
My dream is to see people like these girls dream again. My dream is to see chains and lies that are past down from former generations that tell people that they will never amount to anything be broken off and thrown into hell where those lies and chains belong. Because if I have learned anything since following Jesus it’s that just because He has set us free, doesn’t mean that we as believers walk in freedom. We have been set free by His death on the cross, but we have to choose to get up off the mat, accept His grace and walk in the freedom He’s been offering us all along. That takes a lot of us walking alongside each other with grace. It takes us picking each other up off our knees when we fall down and think we can’t get back up again. It takes work and commitment to each other on the days where we would rather run away.
My dream may be hard but I know it’s possible. Because Monday the other team who went to a different Cabin got to take some of the girls they met out into town to talk with them more. And those girls accepted Jesus into their lives. Now they want out of the prostitution industry. And on that same day, two other girls who had been wanting to get out finally have, and they now have jobs where they don’t have to sell themselves to survive.
And they can dream again.
So what is your dream?
Because you actually get to have one.
And it doesn’t cost you a thing.
(Feel free to actually share it with me!)
