Your Chains and Mine

While attending the Restoring Innocence banquet I was vividly reminded that the international billion dollar sex trafficking industry is here in our own local backyard. When I heard the sad harrowing story of a twelve year old girl’s cruel and degrading abuse I felt sadness and anger for her and the other 300,000 defenseless young girls in the U.S. alone. 

Millions of young vulnerable young girls are trafficked each year. Their horrendous stories of abuse are sickening and hard to accept. Many of them experience the same symptoms of kidnap victims
(Stockholm Syndrome) in becoming sympathetic and loyal to their captors.

They are not in chains, but mentally chained to their abusers with no seeming way of escape or rescue. To find out more how you can help stop sex trafficking see I.Y.M.

For millennia millions have been unjustly emprisoned for their politics and faith. In the Bible, Joseph was falsely accused and jailed for years and the apostles were beaten and chained.  Millions have suffered unjustly beyond description.

In stark contrast the Bible talks about our own self imposed chains. Chains of our own making  (Romans 6:17, 20). We become slaves to our misplaced desires, slaves to substance abuse, slaves to peer pressure and acceptance, slaves to self indulgence, slave to sin (Romans 6:19).

Unfortunately, many have put the proverbial ball n’chain on their own ankles. We have given permission to be in our own enslavement. Like the victims of sex trafficking we’re desperate and we’ve been lured into and enticed by an ‘intriguing better offer’ that’s hard to resist. Then we are either quickly or over time chained to something or someone that has taken control over us.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a well known Russian political prisoner endured the harsh conditions of the Soviet Gulag. After eleven years in the labor camp he realized he was chained to his past and that he “was no better than his persecutors.” He met Christ in prison where he also realized Christ came to truly set him free.

Many of us struggle with some kind of overpowering or irritating bondage that we can’t seem to overcome. You can fill in the blank here. Millions have sought countless ways to to free themselves of their chains, but to no avail.

We need a different kind of internal and eternal motivation. Perhaps we can learn from a story of a young slave girl Abraham Lincoln met…

Abraham Lincoln went to a slave market.  There he noted a young, beautiful African-American woman being auctioned off to the highest offer.  He bid on her and won.  He could see the anger in the young woman’s eyes and could imagine what she was thinking, ’another white man will buy me, use me, and then discard me’. 

As Lincoln walked off with his ‘property’, he turned to the woman and said, ‘You’re free’.  ‘Yeah.  What does that mean?’ she replied.  ‘It means that you’re free.’  ‘Does it mean I can say whatever I want to say?’  ‘Yes,’ replied Lincoln, smiling, ‘it means you can say whatever you want to say.’ 

‘Does it mean,’ she asked incredulously, ‘that I can be whatever I want to be?’  ‘Yes, you can be whatever you want to be.’  ‘Does it mean,’  the young woman said hesitantly, ‘that I can go wherever I want to go?’  ‘Yes, it means you are free and you can go wherever you want to go.’ 

‘Then,’ said the woman with tears welling up in her eyes, ‘I think I’ll go with you.’ 

Can you put yourself in the girl’s chains and hear Christ say to YOU –“You’re FREE!”?

Now, can you see yourself saying to Him, “I think I’ll go with You?” Romans 6:22

To read more about being set FREE see the blog  ‘In Between’