Girls for sale...at McDonalds

I recently returned from 11 days in Thailand where I had the privilege to get to know some awesome people & join them in bringing light to a dark place. I wrote while I was there about our prayer walks & how they impacted me. The night after I wrote that, we got to go on outreach into the red light district. For the safety of those living & working in Bangkok, I can't tell you who I was with or even what part of the city I was in (secret spy stuff! lol). But I can tell you what I saw & what I learned.
After some awesome prayer & worship on a balcony overlooking the city, we broke into two teams and headed out into the dark, damp streets of Thailand's capitol. My group ended up sitting in a coffee shop. We didn't speak to anyone but Jesus, each other & our waitress. Why a coffee shop, you ask? You probably have some image in your mind when I say "red light district"; something like a slimy street with bright lights and women for sale. But in Bangkok we found girls for sale at a coffee shop...and at McDonald's. I don't know what your favorite coffee shop or local McDonald's is like but I'm betting there aren't girls openly for sale in them. In certain parts of Bangkok, after dark, girls are for sale everywhere. So we went to a coffee shop to pray for those girls waiting in that coffee shop for customers. We prayed for their customers too. We also went with a lady that will be returning to that area to eventually become a familiar face and hopefully a ray of hope to those girls.
I learned that night and that week in Bangkok that ending human trafficking is not always dramatic or instant. Rescue is not always police kicking down doors in a raid (which, done the right way, can be a good thing but that is a story for another day). Often rescue is a process and a journey. Sometimes love whispers quietly under the noise, "someone cares, you are not forgotten, you are worth rescuing, you are worthy of unconditional love." Just like Jesus stopped for that one woman at the well (John 4), love in Bangkok's red light district looks like stopping to pray for the women for sale in that coffee shop, or at McDonald's, or on the street corner.

...and just like that I'm back!

I am so happy to be typing on a real keyboard again! Smart Phones are great for short updates while traveling but not so much for typing long stories! I am back on American soil (hence the real keyboard) & trying to process those crazy, amazing, beautiful, hard, heart-breaking 11 days. I loved every minute of it. Well minus the minutes on the airplanes, the minute the rat ran over my foot & the minute I said goodbye, I loved every minute of it. My heart was so happy to be back in in Thailand; in some ways, it felt like coming home. So many things were familiar, like the language, the food, the smiles, the smells, the sounds, the humidity & rain. I even started to fall in love with the big-city-ness of Bangkok. The hardest part has been coming home. I cried when I said good bye to friends & realized I was also saying good bye to this place that felt like home with no idea when I'd be back again. Now I'm trying to get used to going back to work, being cold & eating things like meatloaf. These are all superficial things but they are all reminders of deeper things going on in my heart that I still don't understand. The trip seemed too short; just as I was falling in love all over again & settling in, it was time to jump on another murderous 20+ hour series of flights & it was all over. I guess I just got shocked at how soon the end showed up. But it hurt too.
  All of that to say, I will be posting more stories and pictures from the trip. I just need some more time to process it all first. So stay tuned!