The nameless faces

As anyone on the planet knows, the super bowl just ended. And anyone who knows me knows that I’m normally very apathetic to all things sports (unless I have a good reason to make fun of someone for their team losing to Texas A&M), and the super bowl is normally no exception. I never care who plays, who wins, who loses, where it’s being played, or why standing room only tickets cost $2,000. This year was different. I was avidly against the entire super bowl concept, and it’s being held in Dallas.

It had nothing to do with the Cowboys not playing, or the effect it may have on the economy (positive or negative), or even because Arlington is the hotspot for all things ridiculously expensive (Six Flags, the ballpark, now the Dallas Cowboys stadium). It was because through my involvement with The Village Church, Jesus Said Love, and Unearthed, I became aware that for this super bowl event almost 50,000 girls and young women would be trafficked to and through Dallas to be sexually molested, abused, and raped to “celebrate” this most idolatrous of events.

God does answer prayer though. The week before the super bowl, many of us gathered together to pray, ask, beg, and plead with God to do something to intervene and lessen the blow, to save these young women from having such horrific sins committed against them. He answered our prayers with freezing rain, sleet, ice, and amounts of snow that I can’t remember ever seeing in Texas.

In a blog about these events I read a story about a pimp who “…had control and ownership of about 70 other pimps with total control over about 1,600 prostituted women in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area” giving his life to JESUS! Read the full story here.

As is appropriate, my first response is to thank God for such a miracle. That God would breath life into a man in such a profession of oppression is to me, unthinkable, which makes it all the more awesome. Then the full weight of that hit me. SEVENTY OTHER PIMPS and SIXTEEN HUNDRED PROSTITUTES in the DFW area?!?!!?!!!? WHAT?!! When I hear the word pimp or hooker, I flash to some law and order episode and think “Yeah, places like New York and Chicago have a problem with that”. But here? Really? In the supposed heart of the “buckle of the Bible belt”?

Where are these people? We drive past them, avoid the areas where we have heard them rumored to be, we are content to allow them to be nameless faces so that we do not have to be responsible for reaching out to them, for doing the unthinkable and communicating the wrath, grace, and love of God to those who so desperately need to hear it. And we call ourselves Christians? Really?

What kind of “little Christ” avoids the least, the lost, the last, and the lonely? What kind of “little Christ” knowingly avoids areas where “sinners” frequent? What kind of “little Christ” only spreads God’s message among those who have already heard it?

Get out of the Christian bubble. Get over yourself. Get beyond pious legalism (and repent from it!). Get out of your comfort zone. Be willing to take a punch so someone else doesn’t have to. Be missional.

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