Open Eyes

I began attending meetings for the International Justice Mission (IJM) chapter on campus at the beginning of the year at Spring Arbor because of my interest in helping those who cannot help themselves. It was here that I started learning about all sorts of social justice issues going on in the world. Injustice angered me to the point of tears, but most of the time I found myself ignoring it because I don't like to cry, and I didn't see what I could possibly do. I had switched my major to sociology after I rejected the teaching idea, and in my soc. 101 class I did a project about human trafficking that forced my eyes open.

An excerpt from this paper:

            Human Trafficking is defined by article 3 of the United Nations as “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons… to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation” (Ray, 2007, p. 72). Generally described, human trafficking is the movement of people from one location to another so that they can perform forced labor (Macionis, 2009). Because human trafficking is illegal almost universally, most cases of it are underground and it is difficult to be sure of how commonly it truly occurs (Hagen, et al. 2007). Even so, it has been guessed from around 700,000 to as many as four million people are trafficked across international borders each year (Aguilar-Millan, et al. 2008). Furthermore, it is estimated that 80 percent of all trafficked victims are women (Yen, 2008) and about one fourth of these women are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced prostitution (Alexander, 2008).

 I can't describe to you well enough what researching this topic did to me. There were nights that I would spend pounding the ground and weeping—about people I have never met and an issue I had never encountered. My heart, in fact, broke about it.

I began to think about how if I was feeling this way, how much more God’s heart must be hurting. I didn’t even know these women, but He had created them Himself. It was the personal stories of people that really got to me. I spent time trying to picture myself in the situations they were in, and I couldn’t. I had never experienced anything remotely like what they had been through. All I could think was, “Why? What makes me so lucky?” And that’s when I first began to feel the weight of a burden of responsibility—because here I am with so many resources and in great health like a quivering bundle of potential. What am I going to do with that?

What I can, probably.