Day 7:  30 Days of Prayer for Hope If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. (Psalms 139:8-10) In dark alleys, in backs of long-haul trucks and crude slum shacks, trafficked and exploited children feel alone, abandoned, and hopeless. Without intervention, many will never know how precious they are to God and to us. …

Day 2:  30 Days of Prayer for Hope The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40) No one truly knows how many children are exploited every day in the Brazilian sex trade. There are certainly at least 250,000, and some estimates run as high as 2,000,000. Hunger, drug addiction, and poverty drive the children to prostitution. Statistics can sometimes be numbing, but we know every one of them is precious to our Lord. Hope Unlimited takes a special interest …

When a girl over the age of twelve comes into our care, we assume she has been sexually trafficked or exploited – or at least abused. And we are almost always right.  Why? Because that is what happens to orphans. These kids are not just at risk. They are at mortal risk. Lives either over or destroyed unless we fix this problem. And there are 153 million of them. Let the number sink in. 153 million children. The United States has a total population of about 300 million; 153 million is everyone west of the Mississippi, and a few back …

When a twelve-year-old girl comes to us at Hope, we assume she has been sexually exploited. Because that’s what happens to children of the favelas in Brazil. In a place of hunger, of hopelessness, a place of pain, in a place where children are desperate, that’s what happens. A little girl discovers she can trade the only commodity she possesses – her body – and the men at the neighborhood bar will give her a few Reias if she will do what they ask her to do. All of her friends make their money the same way. There is no …

I am speaking this week at the International Christian Alliance on Prostitution conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin. This is a really important group of folks who do critical responding to one of the great evils of our age: sex trafficking. As I prepare to go, I think this is a good time to revisit a previous post on the subject. Some time ago, I told you Ileana’s story. Prostituted by her mother in a shed in their backyard in a slum in Brazil, stories like hers are told far too often not only in Brazil, but in so many places …

The conversation took place last summer. I was sitting in my office talking to our student intern; a really godly, thoughtful twenty-year-old. She had just returned from a college mission trip to Taiwan. It clearly was a life-changing experience for her, and I did not want to dampen her zeal or extinguish the fire burning in her eyes. But I did want her to think deeply about what she did and why she did it. A significant part of her group’s time was spent at a shelter for street prostitutes. Each evening, the young women came in from the streets, …

In January you may have read Ileana’s story, a story told far too often not only in Brazil, but in so many places where young girls are seen as commodities rather than as creations in the image of God. In many countries, what happened to Ileana is not called prostitution. Because Ileana was sold in her own home by her own mother, the law identifies this as abuse, but not prostitution; a ridiculous distinction that does not recognize the extent of the devastation Ileana suffered.   Not only is what happened to Ileana prostitution, it’s sex trafficking. As defined in The United States’ …

The kids at Hope Unlimited come from different backgrounds. Before they are sent to us, they might endure neglect, abandonment, abuse, exploitation, or even torture. Our staff and social workers labor tirelessly to help our students leave the darkness of their pasts behind them, but each child will forever bear emotional and often physical scars. We are their safe haven, and in order to protect their privacy, I will always change the names of the students whose stories I tell, and I will never tell anyone’s story without permission. Last year a visitor from the U.S. asked one of our …