Sex Traffic: A problem of simple supply and demand or a sleepy, blind disconnected church?

The radio woke me up, as usual this morning with the sing song of voices.  

That is until I heard a report on the problem of sex trafficking during large events such as the Omaha Baseball World Series.  Or Warren Buffet's annual shareholder's meeting.  Or college football games.

The report highlighted the problem with young girls and boys who have been enslaved in sex trafficking for years.

The victims stay trapped because they believe no one cares for them.  No one will help them.

While I applaud and support the legislation efforts in state and national government and pray laws can be passed to hold all perpetrators accountable.

This is not a legal issue.  It is a heart issue.

What would cause an intelligent human adult to purchase a young underage boy or girl for sex?  To view sex acts with the same perspective as ordering a cheap combo meal at a fast food restaurant?

How does one go from your home, business or leadership position to another town being perpetrator?  Someone who takes advantage of another?  From respectable to paying for sex?

Would the pimps enslave the girls and boys if no one bought them?  The demand seems high so the suppliers get to work.  Simple supply and demand.

Really?  Simple?

Do any of these buyers of sex, sit in churches in their home communities?  Sit beside their families and put a pittance in the offering plate?  

Sing songs and listen to sermons that does not confront their nasty hearts or make them uncomfortable?

I believe, we as the church, wrap ourselves in the comfortable quilts that are our own worlds.  We have eyes, but we do not see and ears, but do not hear.

We mind our business, do our jobs and sit in restaurants.   Waiters and waitresses come to our tables and we do not even notice them.

We as the church have never been more disconnected from our schools, families and communities as we are now.  

I would challenge us as the church to open our eyes!  To open our ears.

To ask God to give us eyes to see every single individual as HE does.  

Ask Him to open our ears to the cry of the hearts we see everyday.

I believe the church will mobilize IF AND WHEN our eyes see, our ears hear and our hearts are broken and feel for the lost.

Where do we begin?  

Look at people.  Observe.

Meet them.  Talk to them. 

 The next time you go out to eat, spend time focusing on your waitress and others.  

See.  Hear.  Be.

 If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, ⁶ if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, ⁷ then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever.  Jeremiah 7:5-7

Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?  Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain.  Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised. Isaiah 10:1-4

Proverbs 22:22-23

Verse Concepts

Do not rob the poor because he is poor, Or crush the afflicted at the gate; For the LORD will plead their case And take the life of those who rob them.
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Oppression,-God~s-Attitude-To#sthash.OlEy79LU.dpuf

Proverbs 22:22-23

Verse Concepts

Do not rob the poor because he is poor, Or crush the afflicted at the gate; For the LORD will plead their case And take the life of those who rob them.
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Oppression,-God~s-Attitude-To#sthash.OlEy79LU.dpuf

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-- 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them. 6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. 8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth--men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. 9 But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone. 2 Timothy 3:1-9