Faith to confront human trafficking – by Paula Cornell

My third night in South Asia I crawled into bed in my hotel with a heavy heart. It’s hard to describe the pervasive sense of darkness and despair I felt. 

Since arriving there, my coworkers and I had heard story after story of total disregard for the value of human life. Men forced to work in brick factories, children forced to work in card shops, women sold into brothels—while the world around them looked away. 

We were there with Love Justice International, an organization that seeks to share the love of Christ by fighting the world’s greatest injustices. We had come to meet the field staff and collect photos, videos and interviews. 

Overwhelming

It was a short trip and we only had one more day there, but I already wanted to leave. I prayed that night to see God at work despite the overwhelming volume of injustice that I would continue to see. 

The next day, we met the team and watched them in action. God more than answered my prayer.

The noise of the intercom and trains screeching through the station was overstimulating. I sat in a plastic chair just out of the way of traveler traffic, sweating in the heat, trying to interview a young woman in front of me who didn’t speak English. Another young woman sat beside her to translate. 

Monitors

Both of these women were transit monitors who had been trained to look for signs of human trafficking in this busy train station and intercept potential trafficking victims. 

Both had personally intercepted over 100 individuals to prevent them from being trafficked. 

They had just finished telling me this when another monitor approached. “There’s a girl crying on the stairs over there,” he said. 

Easy prey

A five-minute walk away from this station was a huge red light district. Anyone lost or abandoned was easy prey for a trafficker looking to make some cash. 

The woman I’d been interviewing immediately got up mid-interview and ran to the stairs to talk to this girl. Her quick response to the situation and stamina to level with injustice day after day left a mark on me.

Isn’t this our call as Christians—to imitate Christ? Jesus never despaired over the volume of needs brought before him. He never turned anyone away because of inconvenient timing. He was ready and willing to look suffering in the face every single time and bring restoration. 

Transformative

This is the intersection between faith and justice. Faith is a transformative quality—it does not remain stagnant. Faith in Christ must spur us on to imitate him, and this imitation must naturally lead to fighting for justice. It is a call to keep our eyes fixed on him instead of the overwhelming darkness of our world; he will in turn increase our faith, our hope, and our love so that we can continue his work of restoration. 

Sadly, the girl crying on the stairs refused to believe that her freedom was at risk—even though she was likely being trafficked based on multiple red flags in her story and in those of the young men she was traveling with. The monitors spent significant time with her, explaining the danger she was likely in, but ultimately they had to let her go.

Injustice

But the monitors didn’t let that loss discourage them from continuing to seek justice by faith. They did not despair as I had at first, longing to turn my back on these heartaches and leave. I was there only a few days—these monitors and hundreds of others like them are out in the grit of injustice every day, imitating Christ as they look for those being tricked into slavery and work to keep them free.

It’s hard to look injustice in the face. It’s much easier to turn away. But we are called to put our faith in Christ, and he will give us the heart and stamina to care for his people. 

Maybe you are not in the trenches of injustice like these monitors are, but there are still ways to imitate Christ in this way. What uncomfortable wrongs or sufferings have you wanted to look away from? How can you instead put your faith in action to fight for justice today?

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Paula Cornell is a writer for Love Justice International, an organization that fights injustice through human trafficking prevention and orphan care, helping intercept over 40,000 people to prevent them from being trafficked to date.