where freedom lives

Today I met a little girl who was stolen by gun point from her home in rural Nicaragua when she was seven years old. After she was taken, she was sold as a sex slave to a hotel in Managua for $7.50.

I write this not to make you sad, but to make this clear - the world is a broken, messed up, nauseating place sometimes. Children are given away by their parents into prostitution. Women sell their bodies because they have no other source of income. Police officers visit brothels in the name of sex instead of justice. Little girls are made to believe that they are only worth the monetary value men pay to abuse them.

Darkness is not hard to find.

At House of Hope today, we got to talk with April, the director of the program. She told us stories of the women and young girls who live there and also the hundreds who come to make jewelry every week. The mission of the organization is to lift women out of prostitution and to save children from sexual trafficking. According to April and others working at House of Hope, prostitution and sex slavery is a rampant problem in Nicaragua. Whole generations of women sell their bodies, making it the norm for families and for young girls to accept that as their future. The government is doing absolutely nothing to stop this. In fact, when asked what was being done by police man and officials to end brothels, April answered "well, they are being good customers." All of it feels like a desperately dark, unchangeable issue.

A few weeks ago, following a trip to chureca, Trey and I had a conversation about the idea of freedom and what that means. It seems that people in poverty are ultimately not free because they are stuck in the day to day. They don't have the means to imagine a better future. They cannot really save for a bigger house or a better location or a fun trip because they have to survive and put enough food on the table each and every night. And sometimes, not even that is possible. In the same way, these women I've been talking about aren't free either. They are stuck without an advocate, forced into prostitution because they cannot envision another option. They are bound up in the ugliness of it, and it becomes a nasty, viscous cycle.

But you know what else? Bondage isn't simply found in Nicaragua. It's right in our homes too. In that same way that people living far below the poverty line here are without freedom, it seems like me and you and most other people in the U.S. are missing something. As a whole, we are bound to our things. Our happiness is circumstantially based on what we've got, what we wear, what we drive, what name-brand university we attend, where we go out on the weekend, what we can afford. We are blinded by our materialism and our ideas of success, and we cannot imagine a greater life that isn't wrapped up in those things. We aren't free.

But then I think of the little girl I was introduced to today. She walked in from school, smiling and running to hug April. At House of Hope she has, well...hope. She has a future that doesn't involve prostitution. And one day, she will leave, having been given the skills she needs to hopefully stay out of that lifestyle and support herself by other means.

And that is freedom through and through.

Where does it come from though? If government officials can't really give it to us, and if people can't provide it, and if the things we buy aren't lifting us up and loosening our chains, what is? When I walked out of House of Hope this afternoon, I noticed a cross hanging from the wall above the work-room, and it was there that I got my answer.

Where the spirit of the Lord is, THERE is freedom.

I cannot trust in programs to defeat poverty. I cannot trust in good luck or apathy either. Both will fail. I could live in the most lavish circumstances with every opportunity at my feet, and if I don't have the Lord there with me, I am bound up in every sense. It isn't about the greatest methods or challenging government officials or giving things or getting thing, although all of that might be wonderful and I think can result after first acknowledging what is of the utmost importance - we've got to recognize where freedom really lives. And when we do that, we'll soar.