Hooked.

For two years come August, I have spent time volunteering with the Late Night Outreach team at New Horizons, standing on a street corner two or three Fridays a month in the middle of the night – being present with women who live in a shadow world, callous to their basic human rights and their intrinsic worth. I have been honored during these two years to come to know countless women and their stories on various levels of relationship – a handful in particular very intimately.

I read a book a couple years ago about leprosy. It is incredible to me, in the time since, how many parallels I have seen between leprosy and prostitution. In Jesus’ day, the lepers were untouchable – quarantined from society, starved for human touch and community, forced to scream out in the market places, “Stay away! I’m a leper!”

The women I stand with are not untouchables. The message they are forced to relay standing half-naked on a cold street-corner with brazen faces and beautiful hair is quite different. Unlike the lepers, they have been touched in every way – exploited, abused, raped and sodomized, terrorized and beaten. But the isolation they endure is in many ways the same. The most striking similarity between the two is that lepers die not of flesh-eating bacteria – but of a nerve disease that causes them to lose feeling entirely, beginning in their outward extremities and moving centrally. In India, lepers lose fingers to rats who chew them off at night – cruelly, individuals does not wake to save their fingers because the pain is entirely absent. The women that I stand with are not privileged to experience pain. They have sacrificed body parts to the absence of pain – even more, numbness has allowed them to lay down their freedom, their dreams, their rights, their souls, and sometimes even their lives.

And I stand with them because I believe those things can be redeemed. I believe that Jesus gives the gift of pain back to the leper and makes her body whole. I believe that Jesus not only accepts her in her pain, but that He chooses to sit with her in it – He chooses to endure it with her, and empowers her through His mighty love to walk into new life. I believe those things because I’ve walked that path with Him myself – different experiences, different pain, but the same Lord who heals magically and completely.

On that street corner, I have experienced the love, the power, and the presence of Jesus with a nearness that I have not known Him elsewhere. I have seen Him show up countless times in countless lives, I have seen Him grow my faith in the power of prayer and in the power of presence. I love Him and I love those girls.

A friend of mine recently said that God’s calling on our lives is like a hook – that He grabs us when we’re least expecting it, exposes our passions and feeds our dreams until we are captured unexpectedly but wonderfully. His call is entirely more gentle than a bleeding fish’s jaw, but I feel His sovereign leading in my life in such a way. And so I leave in three weeks to learn from and serve a Grecian ministry, Nea Zoi, in the Athenian brothels – because somehow this ministry that I bumped into accidentally has become so intrinsically knit to my heart that I feel bound – hooked – by it, by the love of Christ and His power to heal the broken-hearted.
Last week in my Social Justice class, a guest speaker named Mike McGill shared an invitation to a deeper place in bearing one another’s burdens. He said, “There’s a critical need to grow in our capacity to connect with suffering – both as individuals and as community, specifically the church.” He challenged us to trust Christ to meet us in places of hurt, and provide hope for the suffering.

In my own life, little I have experienced is more powerful than hope in the midst of extreme suffering and forgiveness in the midst of extreme injustice. A few memories along those lines stick out quite clearly:

A Nepali church perched on top of a mountain whose people had endured severe persecution on behalf of their faith in Jesus, worshipping with joy like a mighty waterfall.

My best friend, on the night her sister was killed, blessing the Lord through her tears and proclaiming her faith in His unshakable Kingdom.

A man who had lost his home, pieces of his face and abdomen, and his mental stability in a fire in LA – who wandered the streets for several years in search of something. He found what he was looking for, and now has brought the hope of Jesus to thousands of prisoners suffering in Uganda.

These stories – and myriads more like them – speak to me of a treasure that is greater than money or prosperity or comfort. They speak to me of immovable truth – of hope and life that runs deeper than pain, that burns hotter than fire, that withstands torture, violence, and all manners of injustice.

Since I was a teenager, I have known intrinsically that I would not stand on the sidelines in places of pain. Jesus met me unconventionally – not in a church or at a Billy Graham conference, but in the quietness of my own bedroom, by myself in Paul’s letter to the Romans. He invaded my brokenness and offered me a hope that has remained firm. I will not take that healing in vain. I will let it continue to steep deep in me – and I will run to the broken, so I can see His promises fulfilled in their lives as well. I will not shun their pain – I will be honored by vulnerability and messiness, because I know that it’s in brokenness that I see the treasure of Jesus most profoundly. He is the One who calls death out of life, and empowers the broken to walk in new life – away from social cycles, generational sins, and personal failures.

I want to live in the midst of Jesus’ hope and life and healing. I want to spend my days offering it to others. I want to receive it in my own wounds – so that I can pour it into the wounds of others. I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3)