I will never forget the night I met Renu, I'll never forget her smile or the grace in which she told her story and I will never understand her capacity to forgive. When she was just 14 years old Renu was drugged by a family member and taken out of her home in Nepal and sold to a brothel in India. She literally woke up in captivity, her innocence brutally stolen, her story is one of pain, unimaginable horrors, rescue, love, and forgiveness. Someone dared to rescue Renu, they showed up in her nightmare and told her about a man named Jesus, she listened and fell in love and accepted Him as her Savior, but she was still a slave, her body used by 20 plus men a day. Outside she was dying yet her soul was renewed daily. Through miraculous circumstances Renu escaped and upon returning to her native Nepal she came face to face with the man who stole her childhood, her dreams, her future. She looked at this man and forgave him saying how could I, a sinner forgiven by Christ, not forgive him? Renu changed my life in many ways but perhaps most importantly she put a face on international human trafficking and sex slavery.
And then I read, Renting Lacey, which is about America's prostituted children and I associated a different face with child trafficking, my daughters. Maybe you were like me and did not think this could happen here in our country but the truth is at least 100,000 American juveniles are victimized through prostitution each year!! The book is horrifying in its true stories of girls that Linda has met with personally, stories so horrible you think they could not be true, but they are. I am haunted by what I have read, which is why I am sending you this email. Maybe you are like me and imagine that if you lived in times of slavery that you would have stood against it, I like to think that Angela Grimke and I would have been friends and fought slavery together. And maybe you cannot comprehend that just 50 years we still had legal segregation and again I imagine I would have walked with Dr. King, I would have boycotted and picketed, I would have stood on the lawn beyond the Lincoln Memorial and believed in a dream. And yet here we are, living in a time when, "more people are exploited in slavery today than were forcibly removed from Africa during 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Worldwide the total market value of human trafficking is 32 Billion"-IJM
Why am I telling you all of this? This Saturday, October 2nd thousands of individuals in communities across the United States and Canada will participate in SCTNow Walks to raise funds and bring awareness to the issue of child trafficking. You can join my team, Worship Defined, and come walk with me in Portland or simply make a donation at:

http://sctnow.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.team&eventID=652&teamID=6166


I know in many ways this is just a small step, a small donation against huge statistics, but my Bible says to "seek justice" and this is a tangible way in which to do that.

Malia

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-- when you see the naked, to clothe him." Is. 58:6,7