This past weekend was the spiritual awakening that I absolutely needed. My church, Victory World Church, hosted its annual Resilient women's conference. I went last year and enjoyed hearing Valerie Burton speak. I knew our speaker was going to be Christine Caine from Hillsong Church in Australia. I had never heard of Christine and we sing a lot of Hillsong songs for worship. What caught my attention was the fact that Christine was an advocate for the anti human trafficking movement.
Little did I know she was going to change my life.
Christine Caine blew me away! I have heard lots of motivational speakers, preachers, evangelists, you name it, over the years but never has one little petite woman leave me with a heart set ablaze to change the world and wake up the sleeping body of Christ to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth. She has a tell it like it is, no sugar coating, true and honest approach to removing the veil of denial, normalcy, and complacency in the lives of people professing to be Christian.
She came from nothing. Literally. She was abandoned by her mother in a hospital, unnamed and unwanted. She grew up in a poor Greek Orthodox family in Australia. She was sexually abused for 12 years. She learned she was adopted at the age of 31. Yet she went on to be apart of the leadership team for one of the most dynamic and influential churches in the world. She has traveled the globe leading crusades for Christ, spreading the gospel to some of the darkest nations in the world. It was 4 years ago that she was in the Frankfort, Germany airport did she learn about the issue of human trafficking. Being a leader of a church, she was appalled that form of modern day slavery was still happening when there are billions of Christians in this world.
She decided to that human trafficking was not going to continue on her watch.
She established the A21 Campaign, a grassroots organization that has established safe houses in Greece, the corridor for the world's human trafficking. This organization is taking on the global human trafficking issue on like no other organization I have ever seen. Since God has already put this social injustice in my heart, I felt like I was in the right place at the right time hearing Christine speak with such passion and urgency for the church to get mobilized and take back the lives of those that are enslaved. There was such a move of the Holy Spirit on Saturday morning, before Christine even came up to speak again, and as the worship team sang, I was so overcome with His presence, His urgency, His heartbreak, I was in tears. Crying my eyes out, singing His praise at the top of my lungs. My heart was breaking for what broke the heart of my Savior.
I had this passion to set the captives free and I wasn't doing anything about it.
I needed that. I needed that jolt. I needed that renewed spirit. I needed that sense of urgency, that heartbreak, that wake up call. I needed to be reminded that there are 27 million people held in slavery around this world, more than any other time in the history of man kind. I needed to know that 1.4 million of those slaves are sex slaves. I needed to know that traffickers get the women pregnant and sell those babies to pedophile rings across the world. Babies as young as 6 months old, sold for sex, with no documents, no papers, no one even knowing they exist on this Earth.
Where is the church?
I have been rescued from the darkest places in my life so that I can rescue others. Isaiah 61 is my heartbeat. I have been called to proclaim freedom for the captives, to comfort those who mourn, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes. They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.
I am ready to be a trailblazer. I am ready to empty myself so that I can be filled with the Holy Spirit and used in any way He see fits. I yield to my own will, my own desires and I full surrender to His will. I am excited. I am on fire.
I am on His mission to set the captives free.
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