An answer to prayer, perhaps? At the start of the journey, Nelson and her crew prayed that “God would reveal his beauty and creation and nature, and allow me to endure this long trek.”

My friends and I had been overseas for a month and a half. As the oldest person on the trip, I found myself responding differently to the same situations — differently from my friends, but also differently than I would have responded even three years earlier. My life — once marked by the virtues of impulse and originality — now had a different rhythm. This reality was exposed through my interactions with a new culture, and after seven weeks, I put my pen to paper to sort out what was stirring within.

There are things that my friend reminds me of which make me sad. I used to tell stories and put flowers behind my ear and run out in the rain. I still could do those things, there is nothing stopping me, but it would feel insincere, like I am drinking from a well not my own. The things that stir within me move slower, more deliberately. I cannot and will not pretend to be 20, but I need to know, I want to believe that the things I have to offer have value, deep intrinsic value, to the Kingdom of God and to my team.

We all walk different roads.

Last night we were discussing…well they were proclaiming the wonder that every day with God is better than the last. That is a lovely thought, and I’m sure very nice until you find the desert that never ends, until you begin to learn the lessons of suffering and the dark night of the soul.

I began, or tried, to offer to them from the lessons of my own suffering, but it was not received well. Their attitude actually reminded me of my own from years past. It is so strange to hear your own words and attitudes come out of other people’s mouths. There was a time I so desperately wanted respect and recognition that I failed to see the wisdom that was being offered to me.

As I realized the error of my attitude I began to see the folds of depth in other people’s eyes, and I began to long to know what they know. The insatiable desire to be known remained in me, but alongside it came the stillness of listening to other people’s silence. Their silences will tell you much, and still I longed to know what they knew. So I asked God to teach me.
You do not get to choose your own story. If I could, I would have learned these lessons a different way. I do not feel this is wrong or disrespectful to the God who made me. Jesus asked in the garden if there is any better way, any other way. I, too, would have liked a better road, but where I stand today I wouldn’t give up.

Every door we choose, every decision we make, leads us to a new place. Pleasant or not, God walks beside us.

Most of these things are difficult to express, or I would have read them in a book or heard them in a seminar. Most of these things are difficult to perceive until you begin to recognize them. That is why they require stillness and silence even to hear in other’s stories. Once you have begun to live them, you begin to recognize them, and you learn to hush your clamoring, you begin to know when you are on Holy Ground.

There are, however, a few things that can be put into words. Not every day is better than the last. Sometimes life sucks; sometimes you suck; sometimes God seems so far away. There are more questions than answers, and there aren’t always flowers in the desert.

It is possible to suffer without learning the lessons of suffering. Sometimes, in fact, things get worse before they get better. God restores what is lost, but what is lost is still lost. It is good that there are more questions than answers. Hiding from the pain only makes it worse. Denial is, usually, stupid.

Most people need to be heard, not comforted or argued with. Comparing one story to another is pointless and can be harmful. Some have more, some have less, we are all, all of us other. ”…at two you’re an abstraction.”** God is enough. Even when you are alone and all other lights have gone out, He Himself is enough. We must learn to honor the mystery in one another. Blame is pointless. Even the best of virtues is harmful in exclusion of the others, or if they are worshipped.
There are other things you learn as you grow older. Like sometimes it is good to conform for the sake of communication and order. Order is good and disorder is very difficult for some people. Playing in the rain is good, being wet all day is not always good, so sometimes it is better to listen to the rain.

It sucks to always be the one who goes against the flow, but it is worse to watch things fall apart when you saw it coming and kept your mouth shut. It is very tiring to be the oldest. It is much better to be the youngest, especially once you have learned about stillness and mystery.

Age is not the only thing which inspires sanctified impatience, and I revisit these words as I face similar challenges in a regional culture that believes maturity and effectiveness is equivalent to living by your day-planner, a church culture which embraces the same value, and where contending is considered so high a virtue, and waiting is so seldom seen, that the two are often confused. Even I am flurry of activity as God gently and firmly repeats in my heart, “Be still. Be still. Be still.” For me, all of the coming and going, even the thinking and processing, and going going going is an elaborate ruse to keep me from a deeper pain, so I need these words again, to remind me of the power of stillness, silence, and the lessons of suffering.

*from the song “Sunrise” by Nichole Nordeman
**Thank you Sara Groves for this confusing song lyric. “Who can know the pain, the joy, the regret, the satisfaction, at two you’re an abstraction.” Which means each life is so hard to know, each person so individual, once you begin to talk about to people or more even with the same or similar experiences, you must abstract their story…they become something not quite a person anymore…they become an abstraction.

“Last Friday, IJM’s Chennai team rescued 13 children, women and men from slavery in a large rice mill. Forced to live in tiny shacks within the compound, the slaves were desperate for release. One of the victims, Mukesh*, was suffering from tuberculosis and had been forbidden from leaving the mill for treatment. At rescue, he had not eaten for four days.

Today, he and the rest of the slaves are free. Mukesh is receiving medical treatment, and he and the other former slaves will receive funds and supplies from the government to build their new lives. IJM aftercare staff will provide them with continued assistance as they resettle in their home villages.”

International Justice Mission works in countries where there is a functioning legal system that allows them to prosecute people who are trafficking in human lives, along with other injustices. The process is a slow one, but when criminals are punished for breaking laws, others are more likely to think twice before committing the same act. Over time, an entire culture can be changed.

This is the hope we are talking about with Hope Ink. Hope for people in slavery. Hope for the downtrodden and those living in extreme poverty. It’s a gut-wrenching, one-person-at-a-time operation to begin with, but like a snowball, if we can get things rolling, the impact gets larger with each turn.

You might not be a lawyer, but you can help rescue people condemned to a life of slavery. See how you can get involved by visiting IJM’s Website.

I had no idea how long I would be there, so I just trusted God from day to day. I had no idea what Haiti would be like, but I knew God called me there, so I was going to be obedient and just trust him. The first week I was there, I had a divine appointment with a local Haitian named Wesner. He wanted to show me around town and take me to the local market, so I went with him.

As it turned out, he knew everyone. His friendship opened a door for me to minister to everyone in the town. I started playing basketball on a local team with Wesner, and every single day I went to practice, God brought people to me to talk about my faith in Christ. I got to share with lost people and other local Christians in Montrouis about having a relationship with Jesus and how God looks at our hearts.

It was a God thing for sure, and I know the Holy Spirit was just giving me words to say to each person that I talked with. After basketball practice we would go and hang out in downtown Montrouis, and Wesner would introduce me to people. I got to share the love, grace, and forgiveness of Christ with them. I built real relationships — hanging out with them, laughing, dancing  — whatever I could do to tell them about Jesus. It was definitely out of my comfort zone, but I knew I had to be obedient to what God was telling me to do.

I lived about 40 miles from Port-au-Prince. We were shaken, but not stirred by the earthquake. I was actually playing basketball up the street with some locals when it happened, and it was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. By God’s grace, no one here was hurt. We had no cell service, though, so we couldn’t call to let everyone know we were okay. There was extensive damage in Port-au-Prince and other areas.

In Port-au-Prince, and other areas, the destruction was massive. Buildings collapsed and killed many, and many more were missing. Some people that work on our campus in Montrouis lived in Port-au-Prince in the area that was hit the hardest. Without cell phone communication after the earthquake, they were not able to get through to their families and only could listen to local radio talk about the thousands of homes that had collapsed. We spent the night in prayer and prepared to take them to search for their families first thing the morning after.

As we made our way to Port-au-Prince, it was clear that we were in for a tough day. We were able to pick our way through streets strewn with debris and power lines. Every hospital had closed gates and thousands of wounded and dying lay on the sidewalk outside. We stopped at one hospital to search for our friend’s wife and while we were there, we started treating people with non-life threatening wounds.

Digging chunks of cement out of gaping wounds, cleaning head wounds — the work was gruesome. One of our friends, Dr. Kerry Reeves, had a mother beg him to go and check on her little girl. When he got there, she was completely covered with a sheet. Upon pulling back the sheet, he was pretty sure she was dead — covered in flies with a gaping head wound and disfigured face. Kerry was able to find a weak pulse and get her to respond. He got the girl some water and tried to see if there was anything he could do. Unfortunately, he was only tell the family how to care for her as she waited to see if the hospital would open. Kerry prayed for her and her family and left broken-hearted.

We picked up a 12-year-old boy whose parents and friends some were carrying him down the road using a door as a stretcher. They needed a ride to the hospital. While in the back of the truck, we tried to help him but he had a major head injury and a crushed shoulder. I wept over the little guy, so broken that we couldn’t help him. I felt so burdened that we had to talk to him about his faith before he died. We got down on our knees as he looked at us through swollen eyes. He gave a testimony of loving Jesus and believing that God was waiting for him if he was to die. We prayed and wept with him. We dropped him off at the hospital and left not knowing his fate.

On the way back home, all I could do is cry. Seeing all of those dead bodies tore me up inside. All I could think was, ‘I hope they know Jesus.’ When we got home, I praised God for everything – for saving me from the earthquake, for the people we were able to help even a little. I fell asleep for about 20 minutes and got woken up by another aftershock.

We could not count the dead bodies in the streets and on the sidewalks in Port-au-Prince. Everyone was afraid to go back into the buildings, so they built sheet tents in the streets and all over parks. Many of them are still living in these conditions. One of our good friends that barely escaped before his house fell spent the night standing in a parking lot with over 2,000 other people, praying God would let them see one more day.

After the earthquake, we were doing a lot of going back and forth into Port-au-Prince with different groups from the Montrouis area, distributing food, water, clothing and toys. It was great working with everyone, being used by God, sharing his love and being the hands and feet of Jesus. We were so busy, working long days. It was so hard going back and forth, still seeing all of the people living in tents.

Haiti is in a desperate place as a nation. While aid groups provide physical help, the people of Haiti needs God’s help. They will not ever recover solely from humanistic aid. They need the transforming power that God brings. We need intercessors to come and prophetically declare God’s truth over the nation, to come and usher in His presence into the refugee tents and the rubble-covered streets.

The Red Cross is not full of the Holy Spirit. Haiti’s Civil Protection is not full of the Holy Spirit. The UN is not full of the Holy Spirit. They bring help, but not the Kingdom. Haiti will be changed as people begin welcoming in the One who can make beauty from ashes.

Philip Causey was a Discipleship Training School student at YWAM Pismo Beach in 2009. He served for several months in Haiti before and after the earthquake, and will be joining staff with YWAM Pismo in May 2010.

Interested in going to Haiti? Project Sixty One, a ministry of YWAM Pismo Beach in Central Coast, is leading teams overseas to bring aid. For more information, visit their Website. You can also follow them as a friend on Facebook and Twitter.

20. Million. Can you even begin to wrap your mind around that? When I first read these words on International Justice Mission’s Website, I couldn’t grasp the numbers.

To be honest, I live in Letter Land, that happy place where writers live in oblivion of things like numbers. Slapping a number in front of the word million rarely moves us, because it’s out of our realm.

20 million what? Dollars? Writers never make that much, so that’s out. Words? That’s a Dostoevsky novel. Perhaps too many words.

20 million people? What does that even look like, that mass of humanity, nameless and faceless?

To make up for my numerical deficiency, I have taken to creating word pictures to make more sense of numbers beyond the reach of my imagination. It’s a journalist’s trick my former editor taught me, but in the age where information gets thrown at us with little or no explanation, we have to fight to grasp the truth of these numbers.

So, 20 million. Let’s put that into a frame we can understand:

First, Fly to New York City. Check out the Empire State Building. Cruise Broadway. Then enslave the entire city — everyone from Mayor Bloomberg to the Rockettes, down to the last struggling mother in Harlem.

Don’t stop there. Next, travel to Los Angeles, and make slaves of the entire population of metro LA, celebrities included. If you’ve ever driven through LA County traffic during rush hour, you can imagine what a difficult job it would be.

But that only puts you at 12 million. To get to 20 million people, you need to conquer Chicago, Houston and Phoenix as well.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – these numbers are from 1999. The numbers have now leaped to 27 million. And numbers from closed countries are hardly accurate. So you can easily throw in Philadelphia, San Antonio, Dallas, San Diego, San Jose, Detroit and San Francisco into the mix as well.

I am not an alarmist. I tend to walk pretty calmly through life. I’m not easily rattled, even when others around me are whipped into a frenzy, squawking about global warming. Or food chemicals. Or the inherent evil of (insert cause here.)

But when I started looking at these slavery numbers and figuring out what they might look like in real life, I was ready to throw a full-on, loud-mouthed, squawking activist fit.

Once I calmed down a bit, I started asking questions. Who are these people? What does slavery look like?

Take a look at the tag on your shirt. Look at your shoes. Many of the items we wear, particularly cheaply made clothes, are made in factories where people are bought as slaves and forced to work long hours in horrible conditions.

You know that sketchy massage parlor in town, the one people talk about as being “that kind of place?” Women are often trafficked in from other countries to work in massage parlors as slaves.

In some foreign countries, slave laborers make bricks and toil in the hot sun next to their master’s palatial homes. Sound familiar from U.S. history class?

According to Paul E. Lovejoy, in his book Transformations in Slavery, from 1650 when the slave trade began, until it ended in 1900, 10.2 million people were transported. While slavery is tragic no matter what era, double that number were reported in one year just 10 years ago, and it is on its way to treble that.

In various countries, from North America to Asia, in small pockets of tens and hundreds and thousands, there are 27 million people with no option where they work, where they live, how they move about.

It’s enough to make a journalist squawk. So let’s do something about it.

Sure, you say. It’s easy for me, sitting behind my computer, making weird noises, to talk about doing something to impact a global pandemic. It’s overwhelming.

I know. Even I am sometimes overwhelmed with the facts, but if we are all concerned, and we move in one thing to stop slavery, imagine the difference it could make.

In England, one man stood up among government leaders and fought against slavery, and it fell. In the US, one man stood up and demanded equality for a race of people, and it happened.

What will you do with your one voice?

My challenge is this: Educate yourself. Visit International Justice Mission, Not For Sale and Because Justice Matters. Read about slavery, and be informed. Let the information soak into your soul, let the numbers go past your head and into your heart. See where it leads you. It just might change the world.

And that’s something to squawk about.

Lauren Nelson is the editor and chief troublemaker for Hope Ink Magazine. She is currently fascinated with 19th century historical fiction and the implications of imperialism. You can e-mail her at hopeinkmagazine@gmail.com.

Cover photo courtesy of Billy Scanlan.

Dominic Laing: As far as this trip to Cambodia, how did you come to this team and this time and this place?

Holland Prior: It was a very bizarre series of events that I can only describe as, ‘This is what God had for me at this very time.’ I’ve, over the last couple of years, been getting more and more educated on human trafficking, and getting more involved in what my particular denomination, the Wesleyan Church, is doing to combat human trafficking. Back in September I went to a conference at our headquarters, human trafficking and what we as a community can do, you know, like raising awareness, education and buying products not produced by slave labor and all that kind of stuff.

So, went to that conference, met some great people. That was in September. So a couple of months later I got this mass email, I think that was sent to everyone who attended the conference, like ‘Hey, we’re taking a trip [to Cambodia] in May.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, sweet, that’d be interesting. I’ll think about that after Christmas, when I have more time.’

I thought ‘That would be fascinating,’ because WorldHope, the organization I’m traveling with, who’s affiliated with the Wesleyan Church, has been in Cambodia for a long time. They run an assessment center where they do after-care and recovery for girls pulled out of brothels. So they work closely in conjunction with International Justice Mission and other organizations that raid brothels, pulls girls out, and they give the girls to WorldHope, essentially, and WorldHope does the after-care.

Then about a week before Christmas I got an email, specifically to me, that said, ‘Hey Holland, we’ve got a last minute opening on our February team. Are you interested? And I went, ‘Well, now that’s interesting.’

Finally I connect with [the trip coordinator], and she answers my questions, and she goes, ‘By the way, if you want to go on this trip, we need your stuff, like, yesterday, because we have to purchase airfare at least six weeks out and it’s six weeks out right now.’

So, I was, I remember distinctly, I was sitting in front of my computer and just went, (claps hands) ‘Okay.’ I turned around and I asked my boss, ‘How would you feel about me taking a couple of weeks off in the middle of the school year?’

Then I went right into the process of collecting all my application materials, because WorldHope requires that you submit a few references, and get all your proof that you have all your travel documents and everything. I basically drove straight to my pastor’s house and was like, ‘Here’s a reference, fill it out while I’m watching, because I have to go fax all this in right now.’

It was pretty crazy. I was able to track down everything that I needed that day, fax it all in. I had this conversation with the lady on Friday. By Wednesday, I had a plane ticket for Cambodia.

D: Wow. Incredible.

H: I’m still…I walked around for a couple of weeks – ‘I’m going to Cambodia. What just happened?’

D: How long are you going to be in Cambodia?

H: I will be there about ten days.

D: And it’s you and who else on the trip?

H: It is me and five other women, so there’s six of us total. I don’t know any of them. They are all out of a church in Buffalo, N.Y. Their church decided to put together this team to send a team over to Cambodia to work in the center. And the reason I got called in was, I guess, initially there was, I think four, there must’ve been four, that were gonna go, and then another woman signed up. WorldHope prefers to travel in even numbers, and they didn’t find anyone else at the church who wanted to go, so WorldHope — I still don’t know to this day who at WorldHope gave them my name — but WorldHope contacted me right away and said, ‘Do you want to go?’

D: So you’re working in the center?

H: Yes. They call it the assessment center, the girls are there for, I believe, up to 60 days. They’re between the ages of 4 and 14.

D: That young?

H: Yeah.

D: Serious?

H: Dead serious.

D: I would’ve thought they were like, 12 to 18.

H: Yeah. The girls are between the ages of 4 and 14 at the center, and I believe they can house up to 50 girls, and they’re usually full. During [their time there] they call it the assessment center because they kind of assess, ‘What’s the situation?’ Does the girl have a family to go back to? If she goes back to the family, are they going to sell her again?

And then they try to decide is the girl’s family safe? Is the family the reason she was in the brothel in the first place? Did they sell her? Was she kidnapped? Or somehow, was the family tricked? You know, like, ‘Hey, I’ll take her into the city so she can go to school and whatnot.’

D: And then she disappears.

H: (nods) So they assess what to do next. Does she go back to her family? Does she go into a long-term facility where she’s given some education and taught how to make a life for herself?

D: Does the assessment center offer any medical assistance, if necessary?

H: I believe so. I don’t know as many details as I think all the women from Buffalo, because I came on so late.

D: The girls that are in the assessment center, are they mainly coming from brothels? Or is it a combination of slave labor and sex trafficking?

H: It is my understanding that this specific center is sex trafficking. So the girls are coming from brothels.

D: And ages 4 to 14?

H: (nods) Ages 4 to 14. Which breaks my heart. Absolutely. I was, like you said, expecting 12 to 18 [year olds,] but when she said, ‘Oh no, all the girls are between 4 and 14,’ I almost cried right then. Four years old?

D: In your opinion, are people in Cambodia aware of what’s happening, and are people in the United States, or in your community, aware of what’s happening?

H: I can’t really speak for Cambodia. I haven’t been there before and this will be my first time. I don’t really know what the climate is. My general impression is people know what’s going on. Because you kind of know if a girl disappears, I mean you pretty much know what happened.

D: And as far as American awareness?

H: I think Americans are woefully uninformed, unaware, blissfully ignorant, whatever you want to call it.

D: What misconceptions do you think people may have about human trafficking? Like, my thought that the girls’ ages were between 12 to 18, when in fact they were much younger.

H: I think the biggest misconception is that these girls are somehow at fault. Like, ‘Well it’s their fault. Maybe they got into debt or whatever, and they chose to be a prostitute.’ Or, ‘Well, being a prostitute’s the lifestyle they chose.’ They never chose this. I’m not saying there not prostitutes in the world who have chosen it. But girls living in brothels, who are victims, there’s no way they’ve chosen this.

The second misconception is that they stay there by choice because they’re not shackled in any way. So it’s, ‘Well, why don’t they just escape? Why don’t they go get help? Why don’t they try to make their lives better and get out of there?’ The answer is — they can’t. Because we don’t, most people don’t understand what fear can do to a person. I mean, if you’re 4 years old, and I steal you from your family — I tell your family some story about, ‘Oh, I’m gonna give you an education or whatever, and take you into the city with me…’

Once we get there, I sell you into a brothel, and then say ‘If you ever try to escape, you’re going to be arrested because you’re now a criminal. You’ll go to jail. Your parents will go to jail because they willingly let you come and do this. If you try and go back to your parents, they’re going to hate you because of what you now are.’ I mean, you are completely imprisoned. It’s just not in a physical sense. So I think that’s another big misconception that there’s something they can do about it.

And I think the third one is that there’s nothing we can do. I hear that a lot. ‘But, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ False. No, not everyone is going to go raid brothels with International Justice Mission. Not everyone is going to be traveling overseas and doing that. But newsflash: Human trafficking is in America, too. It’s no excuse to not educate yourself; to educate yourself, educate your community.

There’s a fabulous group down in Orange County out of Vanguard University. They go around to the free clinics, where they speak languages other than English a lot of the time. A pimp will hardly ever take one of his girls to a hospital if she gets sick, because the authorities might become involved. But they will take them to these free clinics where they’ll probably never see the same doctor twice, they don’t all speak English, so it’s not a huge risk. This group will go into those kind of clinics and train the staff to recognize signs of human trafficking, so they know what to look for.

D: Do you know the name of the group?

H: Sandy Morgan leads it. She’s the administrator of the Orange County Task Force for Human Trafficking. And she is also, I think, the director of women’s studies at Vanguard University. She coordinates a lot through the university and has her students go out and do a lot of this stuff.

D: Before talking to you, one of my misconceptions was the size of the problem in the United States.

H: Mine too. I would have said, ‘Well, that happens overseas.’ But that’s not true. And also, where you put your money — into the clothes you buy, the food, the products. Pay attention. Do the companies use trafficked persons? Because, human trafficking is more than sex trafficking. There’s slave labor, forced labor, bondage. I’m ashamed to even go through my closet and see that most of the stuff that I own is probably made by a slave.

I just read the latest watch-list and found out IKEA is horrendous for their use of slaves. IKEA and Hollister, and I forget the others that were on top, but I was just like, ‘Oh, gosh.’ And people are generally becoming aware of free trade coffee.

D: Right.

H: That’s kind of becoming a trendy thing. But we don’t realize the scope of it and how much of it is used, how much [clothing] is produced using slave labor. I mean, you see a nice blazer in a store, probably cost, like 60 bucks. And you’d probably think, ‘Hey, good quality, name brand, that’s a decent price. 60 bucks.’ The woman in Bolivia who produced that, probably gets paid a dollar per coat she produces and it probably takes her two days to make the coat.

D: And that dollar for the two days is all she gets?

H: That’s all she gets, and probably, she has three kids. I’m totally making up this scenario, but…

D: But it’s almost like a statistically proven hypothetical.

H: Yeah.

D: I think hearing even just a little bit of this, it’s easy to get the feeling of ‘Oh, there’s so much…again, it seems so impossible to…’

H: It’s so big, I can’t do anything.

D: Right. So where did you get the inspiration to keep going?

H: In truth, I’m still a newbie in this field. There’re people who’ve been doing this a lot longer and who know a lot more than I do.

D: Sure, but to actually say, ‘Yes, I’m going to go on this trip…’

H: Yes. The more closely I come into contact with who God is, and what God’s desire is for all of His creation, for each individual human being, the more sickened I am by things that are happening to these people. Every single person is created in the image of God. I have the image of God, you have the image of God, each person has the image of God. But also, collectively as humanity, we bear the image of God. I don’t think we fully understand what it does to us when that image is stomped on, even if it’s not personally stomped on in me. It effects us all.

D: It’s like a dedication to the image of God and to prize the image of God in other people.

H: I really truly believe we are marring and distorting something beyond what we can measure and we don’t understand the cost. We really don’t understand the cost.

When we ignore, or fail to fully understand what it means to bear the image, I mean the imago dei, the image of God within us is part of what helps us understand who God is. So if we’re not in touch with God, if we’re trampling on it, then of course we’re going to have a misunderstanding of God.

D: So what have you done in so far as preparing for this trip?

H: I found I don’t really know how to prepare. I mean I sit down and get out my journal and pray be like, ‘Okay God, how do I emotionally prepare for this?’ And then I would realize what I just said and say, ‘How do you emotionally prepare yourself to see a 4 year old child rescued from a brothel?’ I think that should shock and horrify me. I don’t think I should be prepared for that. So, beyond making sure I have bug spray and everything, I don’t know what other preparations to make.

I know I’m going into something I’m not fully prepared for, but in many ways, I think it’s good that I’m unprepared. Because I think to go and see that, I mean I don’t know what I’ll feel like after this.

For more information concerning WorldHope, please visit www.worldhope.org. For more information concerning International Justice Mission, please visit www.ijm.org.

Dominic Laing is a writer, director, editor, and anything else. He lives in Pasadena, Calif. For more of his writing, please visit www.dominiclaing.com

So long as we love, we serve;
So long as we are loved by others,
I would almost say that we are indispensable;
And no one is useless while they have a friend.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

Justice. It’s a word denoting the concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, and equity. History is littered with attempts to define it philosophically, pragmatically, existentially and scientifically. Every page of world history tells a story of justice or injustice, intertwined with the story of civilization.

But that’s so macrocosmic! Such a large scale. To truly define justice we have to get closer. How do I define justice? Justice, for me, is not a concept to play with. For me it is the real desire for equality in the realm of society.

Society? That’s still too large. While justice remains a global ideal, it happens one person at a time, in places like Little Flower Mercy Ministry in India. Started in 1988 by Mathew Manuel and Molly Manuel, Little Flower is a place devoid of the jargon of justice one often sees today. Instead, it is a place where 200 examples of God’s definition of justice reside.

At Little Flower, the orphaned, the mentally impaired, the old and extreme poor are given the basic amenities of life and the opportunity to share in the joy of life as purposed by God. Rejected by their society built on the law, these people find themselves for the first time with an equal opportunity to exploit their God-given potential. Children have hope for the future, mentally impaired have a community who understands them, older people have a place to be comforted and cared for.

While I was there, questions kept popping up in my mind. Society is littered with people with no hope and justice – Am I not the vehicle of God to reach out to them? By not doing so, am I identifying myself with the society rather than with the purpose of God?

Such acts of kindness start with a man who dares to love people as God has loved him. Robert M. Pirsig was right when he said, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.”

Little Flower Mercy Ministry relies on donations to help them help others. If you are interested in helping, please contact Hope Ink for more information.

Prince Varghese is a photographer from Kerala, India, which is often called “God’s Own Country.” Prince became interested in photography watching his father take pictures with his old Yashica Electro 35. Prince seeks to understand different people groups – their values, lifestyle, environment and struggles – and frame their story without any words.