She was born to a mother who thought seriously of aborting her. Family members were pouring beer down her throat by the time she was two. All around her, every day and all through the long, long nights of her childhood, she was surrounded by drugs and drinking and sexual activity.
Her family constantly battered her with physical and mental abuse, telling her how fat and ugly she was, how no one would ever want to date her, or even just love her for herself. By the time she finished high school, she’d been violated by a succession of boys and gang-raped several times.
At 18, she was living on the streets, trafficked by cruel pimps who threatened her life and tormented her sanity. She worked as a prostitute in 33 states, sometimes making tens of thousands a night for the men who thought they owned her. Pushing 30, she found herself pregnant, broke, addicted to hard drugs, and on the run.
Tired, deep in her bones. Tired … to the depths of her empty, aching soul.
And then, she met someone who’d lived her own hard life. Someone who told her about Jesus.
The young woman asked Him to save her. To come into her heart. To change things.
He did.
That was nine years ago. Today, she is the director of a pregnancy care center in the northeastern United States. She walks the streets, every week, introducing herself to addicts and homeless people. To trafficked women and prostitutes, and their pimps.
She asks to pray with them, and for them. She hands them a business card.
“When you get tired of this, come find me,” she says. A surprising number of them do.
She walks into the offices of city officials and hospital administrators, of police and firefighters. Even pastors. “How can I help you?” she asks. She tells them her story. She talks about Jesus.
“You’ve got problems,” she says, fixing them with a warm but unflinching gaze. “Let me help.”
More often than not, they do.
She's raising a healthy, happy son. She and her team are persuading dozens of women each month to keep their babies, and making it so much easier for them to do so. She’s turning her small community upside down. In a good way. In a way that is changing eternity for a lot of souls lost as she was.
The Gospels are filled with stories like this. Of men blind from birth and women traumatized by years of bleeding … of demon-riddled children and self-destructive maniacs and divorcee′s broken by a lifetime of betrayal. Each of them met Jesus. Each of them was changed.
The change brought them, undoubtedly, the same extraordinary joy I saw glowing in the face of the woman I’ve mentioned. And their transformations, like hers, have brought immeasurable glory to the God who, in His mercy, saved them.
But, here’s the thing. Each of those people was brought into life by that same God. He created them, body and soul, knowing full well – even as He breathed His life into them – that they’d be immersed in these awful, agonizing, all but unbearable circumstances. He saw, long before they came to life, the rapes, the wounds, the mental torment that would tear at their hearts and bodies and psyches.
And knowing all that … He deliberately brought them into those nightmares. Into those long days and decades of misery. He did so, knowing their excruciating torments were the necessary preface to the beautiful miracle. Knowing that the worse the things they were saved from, the greater would be their joy at being saved … and the greater the glory they’d ascribe to His name.
It sounds a bit savage, doesn’t it? But, then, it’s no more than what He did to His own Son.
Brought into the world, by way of a cold manger … pursued by a homicidal king … raised in a village where He was likely presumed to be the illegitimate child of a loose woman and her weak husband. All that, survived and endured, only to meet unparalleled hatred, brutal torture, and a senseless death for an ungrateful world.
A willingness to embrace all of that is the mindset, Scripture tells us, that the Lord expects of His own. It’s not my favorite theme of the Bible. But it’s one of the most prominent on display there.
For all of that, the Bible assures us – and His mercies remind us – that God is good. That He is the only true definition of love. Which, given all of the above, allows for a few observations.
· One, suffering is part of the deal. Incredibly, our merciful, loving God expects us not only to endure it, but to rejoice in the privilege. And to believe Him when He says that our pain – whatever its form – will be worth it.
· Two, in a world as dark as the one we’re rapidly moving into … a great deal of suffering may be required to keep lit the light of His glory. And to secure our deepening fellowship with the Lord who – through suffering – saved us.
· Three, this is not remotely close to what we’re teaching each other, in our sermons and Bible studies. Still, the lessons are coming. “Pain is a brutal teacher,” it’s been said. “But you learn.”
May the Lord have mercy on His students. And brace us, somehow, for things soon to come.
And give us grace to rejoice in the privilege.
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