When the opportunity presented itself I jumped at the chance to be on the blogging team for The Exodus Road, but when the emails started showing up in my inbox it took me a few days to open them. I had never committed to a blogging schedule like I did in my first Advent post, and I really wanted to stick to it. Plus, my grandfather was in the hospital on the way out of this world, finals were coming up and I hadn’t written anything for them (which is sort of what I get paid to do) and the Rooster no longer believes in sleeping through the night. I do not have time for one more thing, I told myself. Maybe in the New Year.

Those weren’t the only reasons I shut myself off. The reason I wasn’t even opening the emails was simpler than that. I did not have room in this brittle heart of mine for one more sad story, one more set of statistics about how terrible our world is. I’ve got enough going on over here thank you very much. Besides,i t is Christmas and now is not the time for a story about bondage.  The readers that I do have want magical happy Christmas land. I cannot blog about sex trafficking.

WARNING: Do not blog, the Lord will use your words against you. I may have written earlier this week about God showing up in the mess. God shows up in the greatest of disasters, in the cold and the hopeless places God brought hope. And that is what the Exodus Road does. They bring hope.

It is sick and twisted to think that a woman would be in such a dire situation that she would sell her daughter. And it is worse to think that someone would come along and buy that girl and turn around and sell her virginity for $600. I don’t want to know that this not only happens, but there is a system set up to allow this to happen and there are people in this world who are getting very rich off of selling people.

The Exodus Road not only seeks to rescue individual girls. Girls like Sarah, who scribbled a note and placed it into the hands of investigators, but they also seek to make it super easy for law enforcement to do raids and collect evidence that will shut the trafficking organizations down. If the traffickers can’t make any money because the risk of getting caught is too high and the clients are scared, they stop the trafficking. No profits no point.

The Exodus Road has been doing some really great work and is seeking to build a whole cabinet full of resources that they can hand out to all the different groups in the area fighting this darkness. The Exodus Road is bringing hope to the hopeless.

I’m not sure where my place is in all of this, but I can feel the Lord turning my heart toward this cause. There is a contest going on between the new blogging team and the person who raises the most money will get to go and see all of this first hand, but when I prayed about doing that, the Lord told me “not yet.” Seems it is a season of waiting all over the place. So how do I join in on this hope?

1. I will be praying for the Exodus Road team.

2. I will be keeping up with the stories they send me and prayerfully sharing them with you.

3. I registered my credit cards with Pure Charity and will donate my free money that I pick which charity to donate to,  to The Exodus road.

This is my candle in the darkness. This is me saying this matters. Won’t you join me?

(Seriously, register for Pure Charity. I am ashamed I didn’t do it sooner and the money I stole from these charities by not getting around to it is currently haunting me. Just sign up.)