faith goes to the dark places

I grew up in a breed of Christianity that sought to be a light, but hid from the darkness.

Though it would never be said, deep down there was concern that the dark might extinguish our glow—or, at the very least, cause it to be misunderstood. 

So we lived with a sterile faith.

Non-polluted.
Pure.
Uncontaminated.

Prosperity was named and claimed, words of life were spoken (#blessed), and this little light of ours shone brightly within the walls of our sacred safe places. 

We claimed the American Dream as our Christian right.

And somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the picture that's actually painted for us in the Gospels. Within those pages, I don't see a sterile faith, holed up to avoid contamination. 

I see pursuit. 

Search.
Rescue.
Scandalous grace.

I see Jesus preferring to spend time with prostitutes, thieves, and those who make a living screwing over their own brothers. I see Him seeking out those who live in the shadows, those the faith leaders of His day shunned completely.

Jesus called us to a faith that is anything but sterile, for an antiseptic faith is powerless. 

Ineffective.
Empty.
Worthless.

The faith we're beckoned to is not concerned about preserving its image or "avoiding the appearance of evil." Instead, it walks down the back alleys; it steps into the slums; it pulls up a stool in the pubs; it sits in the brothels; it finds and frees the shackled.

Faith goes to the dark places.

It pursues the darkest corners of the night and the deepest depths of depravity.

It never fears that the dark will snuff it out. Faith knows that no amount of darkness can dampen its illumination, so long as it shines.

But even the smallest flame can shatter the blackest night.

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The Exodus Road goes into the dark places to find and free modern-day slaves. Please read more about their work and consider stepping into the darkness with them through your support.

:: :: ::

$35/month funds one full day of investigative work in India (called BRAVO Team). BRAVO needs 50 more monthly donors in order to hire additional covert operatives, investigators, and social workers to maximize their impact.

Together, you and I can join the BRAVO Team as the brothers and sisters who show up to find and free the ones in desperate need of rescue and restoration. 

sitting with her

I was in a brothel. 

In front of me, girls danced on the stage. They swayed back and forth on their high heels, and watched themselves in the mirror as they gripped the poles.

Their faces said it all. 

Flat affect. Emotionless. Vacant. Eyes far off. 

Occasionally one would make eye contact with me. I'd say hello with a slight wai bow and a smile, and usually she would smile back before quickly looking away.

This one girl, though—marked on her armband as #37—kept my gaze. We smiled at each other until our smiles erupted into laughter. She looked away, but kept looking back over, a smile plastered on her face.

We asked the waiter to have her join us for a drink. 

This is how it works, I learned. The patrons of these brothels request a girl by number, offering to buy her a drink. In exchange, she spends time with them... and, depending on the amount of money exchanged, provides certain "services". 

Around the room, men were fondling girls' breasts. They were gripping their faces, keeping them from turning away as they forcefully kissed them. Men were thrusting their... parts... in women's faces, touching them in all manner of inappropriate ways, and often interacting with more than one girl at a time. 

The men's faces also said it all. 

Blank stares. Lifeless. Empty. Hollow. 

These had to be some of the saddest people on the planet. Right? I mean, they're engaging in absolutely appalling and nauseating acts. What situations, what circumstances, could possibly have driven them to this point? What do their lives look like that this is where they turn for attention and affection and intimacy (a mere mirage which they are grasping for, but never quite lay hold of)? 

So much heartache in that room, on both sides: victims and perpetrators alike. 

That's a hard pill for me to swallow.

It's not easy to view these men with the same eyes of compassion that wants to wrap my arms around these girls and steal them away. It makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge that brokenness sometimes looks like a stripper, and other times it looks like a john. 

But despite the tension, the discomfort, and the fact that I may not even like to admit it, I know this to be true:

If I say I love Christ, I have to love the johns as well as the girls.

My girl—#37—came and sat with me. Though she didn't know much English, we Forrest Gumped our way through a conversation, asking questions back and forth, sharing little bits of our lives with each other. 

Her name is Ang. 
She came to Pattaya 3 years ago. 
She misses her family.
She does not like dancing in this club.

Sprinkled throughout our 30-minute conversation, she said the words "thank you" over a dozen times. It struck me as so remarkable that I kept count. 

"Thank you for letting me sit with you." 

I squeezed her hand (which had been holding mine). I smiled, and I told her I was so glad she was sitting with me. 

At the end of the night, my mind wandered back to Ang—the very first girl I'd met hours prior. I knew I'd walked away from that brothel without making a life-altering impact on her. I didn't save her from the (possibly) abusive and awful position she finds herself in. Nothing about her circumstances changed because I had been there. 

But I'd sat with her in the darkness. 

I sat with her in her darkness. 

And simply by doing that, she had a half-hour of being treated like a human rather than a commodity. For 30 minutes, she wasn't groped or fondled or sexualized. Instead, she was treated with the respect, dignity, kindness, and love she deserves. 

Maybe that is Gospel work after all.

I went to sleep with Ang on my heart, with whispered prayers of grace for her...

...and for the johns.

---

Please take some time to read about The Exodus Road, and continue to follow along as I learn more about their radical work of empowering rescue for trafficking victims.

:: :: ::

$35/month funds one full day of investigative work in India (called BRAVO Team). BRAVO needs 50 more monthly donors in order to hire additional covert operatives, investigators, and social workers to maximize their impact.

Together, you and I can join the BRAVO Team as the brothers and sisters who show up to find and free the ones in desperate need of rescue and restoration. 

chasing down community

Though this Long Island girl never imagined she'd live in the south, the decision to move to Nashville was a relatively easy one, all things considered. After all, I'd packed up my life and headed to southern Africa when I was only nineteen. Choosing a U.S. city to settle in on my return Stateside didn't seem quite so consequential. 

But that didn't make my transatlantic move any less heartwrenching.

The summer of 2011, I arrived in Nashville, broken in every way.

My decade-long marriage had ended, my ex running off with my (ex-)friend. As founders of a donor-driven nonprofit, when news of infidelity and then divorce was made public, financial support started to dry up. Eighteen months later I was forced to make the most devastating decision of my life: closing down our organization (and, in doing so, laying off over 60 staff members).

In one grand swoop (that seemed equally far too fast and painstakingly slow, all at the same time), I lost my marriage, career, home, friendships, future, and country. My entire adult life had been spent on African soil. And in a proverbial instant, it had all vanished... shattering into a million pieces. 

When I relocated back to the U.S. after 13 years abroad, I felt like an absolute and utter failure. 

Friends graciously welcomed me into their homes with open arms (and open hearts) in far-flung places around the country, like Ohio and Georgia and Oregon. Most days, getting out of bed was considered a win. The days I went to counseling, or engaged the "free therapy" of my own writing, or swallowed my Prozac (along with my pride), or allowed myself to laugh? Those were the days I knew I was taking healthy steps forward.

Don't ever let anyone fool you: Healing is hard work.

All the while, I had my sights set on Nashville. I'd visited a few times over the years, had some friends here, even completed the half-marathon just days before the fateful flood... After living in a rural agricultural region of South Africa for so long, I craved city life. But I'd also grown to love some aspects of small town living that I wasn't ready to give up just yet. Nashville seemed to be the best of both worlds, fitting the bill of the "manageable" city I was looking for. 

But the biggest reason I moved to Nashville was to chase down community. 

I knew I needed to be intentional about surrounding myself with quality people. If I'd learned anything in my 30+ years of life, it was that I can't do this thing on my own. I need a strong support system. We all do. We're wired for it, built to require it. And the handful of friends I had here (almost all of whom I'd met through social media in my early days of blogging from the mission field) were the primary reason why I knew this is where I should put down roots. 

Chase down community. It became my mantra. My touchstone. 

And it proved to be far more difficult than I ever thought possible.

In my first year here, almost all of my friends moved away, relocating for work or love or adventure. Others drifted in the way that friendships sometimes go when different life seasons take over. I struggled to build new relationships, having limited opportunities or contexts in which to meet people. I was left feeling incredibly unanchored. Disconnected. Unsettled.

Community isn't as easy to come by as I'd hoped. Maybe it's Nashville. Maybe it's my age. Or my stage of life. Or my personality. Or maybe it's a Rubik's Cube combination of all those things together. Who knows.

What I do know is this: Developing a life support system gets way harder the older I get.

And it will never just happen on its own.

It demands all kinds of time and effort and intentionality. It necessitates vulnerability and risk. It requires that I keep putting myself out there amid the (disappointingly) often hollow Southern platitudes about "getting together sometime". (It took this Yankee a long time to realize that phrase is more of a pleasantry than the start of a plan to really connect.) 

But eventually, slowly, I began to find those true heart connections again. One relationship at a time, I started to find and build community. I've found it in Instagram connections turned friends. And in wine-infused porch conversations that run late into the night. I've discovered it in the bartenders and staff at my local Cheers. And in laughter and heartache and shared bowls of pasta. 

It was years in the making, but I realized its presence in a solitary instant one night last fall. As my autumn porch party was winding down, I looked around at friends old and new, spilling from the kitchen in the back of my house all the way through to the front yard, and it just hit me all of a sudden: I finally have that community I'd been chasing.

I noticed it in the same way you suddenly realize, as winter starts to fade, that it's no longer pitch black out by 5 PM. 

That seasonal transition never seems quite as gradual as it really is. It sneaks up on you. You just look around one evening and it takes you by surprise to discover that there's sunlight where previously there had been only darkness.

My circle of friends is small, but deep. And they strengthen and support me in countless ways (as I hope I also do for them). But I finally feel that sense of belonging. Of connection. Of settledness. I feel more anchored than I have in years, and as I approach my fifth Nashiversary, I do so with immense gratitude.

My heart discovered sunlight again in this little big town, with its creativity and innovation, its social mindedness and collaboration, its food scene and its musical pulse. And, most of all, its community.

I didn't find a home here.

But I'm building one.

let's celebrate

I decided earlier this year that life is too hard and too short not to celebrate the wins when they come. 

And so I’ve toasted friends' completed work projects and successful accomplishments; I’ve cheersed for good news and strong finishes and job promotions and friendiversaries; I’ve danced it out for simply making it through a difficult week. “Let’s celebrate!” has come out of my mouth more in the past three months than probably the entire three years prior.

So my recent foray into real estate called for a celebration.

A new house sits waiting for a family to call it their own, and the most adorable silver bullet camper is (finally) sitting pretty in her new backyard home.

And while I have no plans to live in either, this enormous (and—GULP—frightening) step couldn’t go by unacknowledged.

So some of my closest friends gathered to celebrate with me this weekend. These friends have encouraged me, championed me, and stood firmly in my corner as I’ve navigated all this, and I am so unbelievably grateful to have them in my life. 

We filled the furniture-less house and power-less camper with pizza and wine and music and laughter and love.

We danced it out.

And we celebrated.

ways unexpected

It happens every year. 

My One Word 365 unfolds in ways unexpected.

As usual, I started the year with an idea of what I hoped my word would accomplish in me. And, par for the course, I've already been surprised to discover how much more it holds. 

Inevitably, there are layers to it that I don't even know to anticipate. 

When 2016 began, I had no clue that badassery would lead me to buy a second home, wear things I swore I'd never wear, say yes to uncomfortable situations and say no to things that aren't life-giving, feel my own confidence growing, or share publicly about my chronic illnesses. 

And I certainly didn't imagine that badassery would take me to Southeast Asia. 

Back in January, I sent off my passport to be renewed. Ten years and thirty countries worth of stamps later, it was time for my fourth passport. With my current one expiring this summer, I figured I'd just go ahead and start the renewal process early.

When I mailed it off at the post office, the postal worker asked me if I had an adventure planned for which I would need my passport. "Sadly not," I told her. "But I want to be ready in case one comes my way!"

Three days later I received an invitation to Southeast Asia.   

On April 1, I'll be boarding a plane with my passport, carry-on, and badassery in hand. I'm traveling there to experience The Exodus Road's work in action, as they help search for and rescue victims of sexual slavery and human trafficking. 

I still feel pretty stunned by the humbling and overwhelming opportunity I've been presented with: To see, experience, and partner with true badasses, risking their lives to help end modern day slavery... I just keep shaking my head in disbelief. 

I know I will witness and learn all manner of intense, heartwrenching things, and that the emotional heaviness will likely be tangible for this deep-feeler. But I will also get to experience a new and beautiful culture and see hope at work, piercing through the profound darkness. 

I want to be able to clearly see, feel, embrace, and then share both sides of that bittersweet paradox. 

Walk with me?

Walk with me into these stories of oppression and liberation, of darkness and light, of despair and hope? 

Do me a favor and follow The Exodus Road wherever you typically hang out online. This way you'll get all the updates along the way, even when I may be unable to post.

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I'm eager to share this whole journey with you as it unfolds. Even the uncomfortable bits and the parts that I can't reconcile and the answerless questions. (Maybe especially those things...) 

Yet again... Ways unexpected.

Walk with me?

A short art piece developed for The Exodus Road, an organization advancing freedom by refusing to let slavery flourish on our watch. Filmed in India & Thailand | October 2015 Executive Producer: Nate Griffin & Katherine Keating Cinematographer/Editor: Jeremy Stanley Producer: Hope Ammen