What is the price of a person? What is the cost of a life? What are you worth? In most countries where human trafficking is running rampant the worth of a human life is tossed around like pennies in a wishing well. A person’s worth is decided by their pimp, their madam, and sometimes even their own family. Every day, human beings just like you and me are being bought, sold and traded like cattle. They are being degraded, labeled, branded and trampled on. So, I ask again, what is the price of a person?
These are questions that followed me around for a long time and I ran from them as hard as I could. I knew what God was asking me to do but I was too scared to do it. God was asking me to confront an evil that had broken my heart and made me righteously angry for many years. God wanted me to stare hell in the eyes and tell them that human trafficking has to stop. I had to tell hell that the worth of God’s people will not be defined by any other price than the one that Jesus was willing to pay on the cross. The problem I faced: How can I do this when I am just ONE person?
I ran from what God was asking me to confront because I was one person and human trafficking is way too big for one person to tackle, or so I thought. I mean take a look at some of the numbers I found and you will see what I mean. The average price of an Iphone today is about $700. The seven hundred dollars that we carry around in our pocket could purchase an average of 8 people out of human trafficking today. Between 2-4 million victims are sold into human trafficking every year making a total of over 35.9 million victims as of 2016. The average lifespan of a victim is only 7 years and it is predicted that trafficking of humans will surpass the sale of illegal drugs in the world in just a few years. These numbers glared at me from my computer screen and laughed in my face. All I could do was ask God what in the world he had up his sleeve and that’s when God turned the tables on me.
Last semester during one of our student led chapels I was feeling particularly annoyed with God for asking me to do something and then giving me no answers about how to do it. As I stood there in worship I heard God whisper, “One Until Everyone.” I stopped dead in my tracks. What in the world is that supposed to mean? For over a week I asked God over and over again what he was trying to tell me. When he felt good and ready he answered me.
God began to show me that the problem he was asking me to face wasn’t too big like I kept telling him. The reason for that was because I was looking at human trafficking and all the numbers that come with it through my eyes and not through his. I was looking at the people involved like a number rather than how God looks at them: one by one. I had to get my eyes off the big picture and get them on the one person in front of me. I had to stop seeing numbers and start seeing worth. When I started to understand this he said it again, “One Until Everyone.” That’s exactly what I am now prepared to do.
Shortly after this God began to lay out new, huge, amazing, spectacular, God-size plans for me. My mission was now to start a ministry that raises money to stop human trafficking, opens homes for victims and says to the world if all of us reached out to the one person in front of us and told them the truth about what they are worth this world could be a very different place. I have started selling bracelets to raise funds to send to groups that actively buy people out of human trafficking and send rescue teams to break up rings of human traffickers. It is a small start but it is just the beginning. It is the beginning of a bigger dream that God has placed in my heart. It is a dream of houses all over the United States, maybe even across the globe, that are full of women pulled out of human trafficking and set back on the path of love and worth. It is a dream of a generation rising up together to stop hell in its tracks.
Every single one of us can change this world no matter how big the problem seems to us. We can do it if we focus on the ONE until EVERYONE knows freedom, knows love, knows their worth. All of us have been redeemed for a purpose. We were redeemed because we have had overwhelming worth from the very beginning of time. So isn’t it about time we stop looking at numbers and start looking for worth? Isn’t it time for us to go all in on this? Isn’t it time for us to run after ONE UNTIL EVERYONE?
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