A Simple Step of Faith

I remember vividly the moment when I was first confronted by the reality of slavery in our present world. I was in seminary and had just finished eating lunch at our campus cafeteria. As I started to walk out of the building, something down the hallway caught my eye. There was a table set up, and at the table hung a poster. On this poster was an image of a girl with a tear rolling down her cheek. The poster said two things:

Slavery is alive.
Rape for profit must be stopped.

This poster stopped me in my tracks. I honestly didn’t know that slavery still existed in our world. I was a student of history. I knew slavery of the past from my books. I didn’t know there was a reality beyond the pages of my books, much less a reality of slavery more pervasive than just about all of human history ever before. I had no idea that there are more slaves in our world today than were extracted from Africa during the four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade combined.

So much of me wanted to purge these words—slavery, rape for profit— out of my memory. I didn’t want to face this new-to-me reality, but at the same time I found myself drawn forward.

There was a representative from the Salvation Army who was hosting the table next to the poster. On the table was a simple mailing list. All I had to do was put down my e-mail address and I would be sent information about modern-day slavery.

One simple step. Seemed simple enough. Even innocuous. Definitely not heroic.

It certainly wasn’t leading a rescue operation with the police. It was putting my name on a mailing list.

And yet that one simple step has literally shifted the direction of my life over these past ten years since. Little did I realize that small action would teach me a profound, lifelong lesson about never underestimating the power of the simple steps of faith and obedience we take each day.

Each choice we make, every day, has the power to sustain and move us closer to hearing and seeing and knowing God, or to draw us farther away. God’s grace is abundant over any and all missteps, but it is still so important to recognize that sometimes our pursuit of the “big” steps can distract us from the crucial small steps that will most effectively form us and draw us with deeper and longer effectiveness into the very mission we seek to serve.

For me, the simple step of giving my e-mail address meant that from that day forward I received information in my inbox—news stories from all over the world, waking me up to the reality of violent injustice in the form of human trafficking. I had to choose whether to take the next small step of actually opening these e-mails. Sometimes I did; sometimes I was too overwhelmed or distracted and didn’t.

But in God’s abundant grace, with each e-mail I did open, with each moment that I chose to put the crippling reality of modern-day slavery in front of my eyes, my mind and heart broke open a bit more.

At first, as I learned more, I found myself barely able to even read the stories, much less able to move myself to action. The statistics alone—the reality that there are 27 million people in slavery in our world today, and that nearly two million children are exploited in the commercial sex industry— are enough to leave any of us feeling paralyzed.5 And paralysis is exactly what happened to me when I first began to engage this issue. I feared growing too close to these issues. I feared letting my heart get too invested. I feared that getting involved would make my life messier than it already was. Plus, I was in seminary. Ironically, sometimes I questioned whether I really had time for this “interruption.”

My paralysis was not submission, and it certainly did nothing to sustain this fledgling justice passion I had encountered in myself. With each news article that I read I found myself opening myself more to my fear of the darkness of trafficking rather than my fear of the God of justice.

But again, by the grace of God, I began to realize that I was missing roots. I couldn’t just absorb all of this new information and expect to persevere. I needed a biblical framework of hope to undergird and root me in the God who already knows, who already sees, who is already at work.

As much as I needed to open the stories and choose to put them in my daily reality, I also needed to continue to open the Word of God and pursue God in prayer, and rest in God’s presence, all the while taking these risks of learning and discerning what to do about everything I was encountering.