I recently read the book Friendship at the Margins by Christopher L Heurtz and Christine D Pohl and am in the process of reading The Hole in our Gospel by Richard Stearns, both of which I highly recommend. Something mentioned in both is humans’ ability to be inhumane to our suffering neighbors. Some of this is made possible by separating ourselves from them and attempting to forget the hard, but evident, truths of the injustice. In other cases it is because, as Richard Stearns puts it, “we have become detached and indifferent toward the constant and repeated images of poverty and adversity that bombard us.” Another passage found in Friendship at the Margins really hit home for me:
The danger for those who work in the hardest places is that they might become calloused. After a while, the unthinkable becomes familiar and our souls whither. We become cynical and hard; the wounds that we have witnessed are borne become too much, and we allow them to become covered with tough, dead skin.
It is way too easy for me to identify with that and my recent cry is just that GOD would break me: to strip away the hardened parts of my heart that prevent me from feeling and acting with deep, sincere compassion.
A one situation in the past couple of weeks really took an impersonal statistic and a sad reality and made it painfully real and personal. The walk through the hotel El Rey in downtown San Jose had a huge impact on me. El Rey, while technically a hotel, is the center of a vicious drug and prostitution ring. Pimps run the show behind the scenes; in exchange for crack the women surrender large portions of their income, which supports the pimps’ large drug trafficking business. We walked through the first floor of the hotel, which consists of a “lobby”, a bar, and a casino, and seemed very similar to what I would imagine Vegas to look like. However, here, even at 3 in the afternoon, the place was full of scantily clad women presumably ready to work for the night. From the moment we stepped inside there was a tangible sense of evil that permeated the entire place. As we walked through the smoky, dimly lit space I couldn’t help but look around at the women working there, their faces especially, and the men with whom they were talking. Their faces are seared into my mind and the oppression I felt in that place is one I cannot shake. I think about the recovering addicts and the ex-prostitutes from the women’s center that have become my friends and I am filled with an overwhelming sadness, almost a feeling of disbelief that such injustice as this really takes place. For me it was one of those things that you hear about in the form of statistics or read about in an article; it is dubbed a “social injustice,” but it became SO frighteningly real to me that day. Not only does it really take place, not only are there thousands, millions, whatever the latest statistics read, that are trapped in a world in which they sell their very selves for money, but I know women who have personally been affected by it. They aren’t just numbers or words on a page but people, with faces and stories.
That is just what has been on my heart most recently. GOD has been answering my prayers and breaking my heart for the people and their situations here. My prayer is that GOD breaks your heart for someone around you this week too; it is a humbling experience. GOD BLESS
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