Tiny Sandals

So yesterday my sister went on a walk downtown for something called iEmpathize. It's an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about trafficking children for sexual exploitation. It was a pretty big deal. They shut down every street we walked down so that we could pass out flyers and wave our signs. There were about two hundred people there. It was all really remarkable.

According to statistics, a child is taken every two minutes. So by the time you finish reading this blog, another one just got taken. There was a tent set up on the site where everyone gathered before we began our walk. It had a movie on a loop and some artifacts taken from outside some brothels in Cambodia, as well as some therapy art children had done. One of the artifacts was a spark plug. I guess this guy was just riding around on a scooter talking to people about these atrocities, desperate to get the word out. They fixed his spark plug, and brought the old one home.

There was also a tiny pair of sandals, which really had an effect on me. Sorry for the poor quality picture... my phone is a piece of junk. When I saw just how small they were, I nearly started crying right then and there. And then every time I thought about those little flip flops for the next few hours, I nearly cried again. The idea of people so small and innocent getting caught up in the machinery of something so awful really got to me.

And now it's a day later, and I can write this blog without needing to fight back a single tear. Is there something kind of wrong with that? It's so easy for us to forget about the outside world, trapped as we are in our own lives, our own agendas. Apathy has become such an automatic reaction it doesn't even feel like a choice anymore... it's just natural to be numb to it all.

But God doesn't call us to forget, or to look away. There's a world out there full of broken, scared, lost, hurting people who need our help. If we don't step into the gap, who will?

So if you're like me, wanting to break the spell of the typical(to quote Mute Math) what can be done? Well, there's praying, there's giving, and there's volunteering, as a start. I think it's important to own these issues. It's not just Cambodia's problem, or those poor starving African kids problem, it's the world's problem. It's our problem, my problem, your problem. Now I'm not saying this to beat anyone up, or to make anyone feel guilty, I just want to stir up a little change. If one person reads this blog and takes one minute to pray for one other person, that's enough for me.