Eat the Cookie... Buy the Shoes, Page 2

  I am going to leave my home soon to go get coffee with my husband and later we’re going to eat lunch. We will probably be gone about two hours, and during that time an estimated 240 children will have been abducted into the sex-trafficking industry. This means two children every minute will have their lives destroyed by someone’s selfishness and greed unless we do something. What can we do? We can care; we can be informed; we can pray; and we can take action. We can support ministries and organizations with proven records of rescuing children and women from these horrible conditions, or if God asks us to, we can even choose to work in these arenas. If full-time work is not an option, we can consider doing something on a project basis or taking a short-term mission trip.

  Sex Slavery

  * * *

  As you walk down the dark alley, the signs of decay and ruin seep from the darkness. Metal scraps and wire hold the crumbling stone buildings together. The air reeks of rotting garbage and human filth. Behind the deteriorating facade, you hear the wailing cries of a child, muffled shouts of anger and rage, and the shrill howl of one of the many stray dogs that roam these cruel streets.

  More than any of your other senses, you are certain of what you feel. There is no doubt… this place is evil. As difficult as it is for you to imagine, it is a place created by wicked and immoral men who sell children for sex.

  This living hell became Samrawork’s home when she was only seven years old. When she was rescued at the bus station at age twelve, she had deteriorated into a lifeless shell of a little girl—skin and bones, emotionally dead with hollow eyes incapable of expression. For five years she was the victim of lustful perverts who paid a higher price for the privilege of violating her little body. They paid three dollars instead of one dollar because she was so young.

  The punishment to her female organs was so severe that she would need extensive surgical repair to ever live a normal life. But the immediacy of her physical needs was minor compared to the damage she suffered spiritually and emotionally.

  Samrawork has been diagnosed with the HIV virus. An orphan, she has no memory of any parents. Like so many others like her, she is trapped in a darkness of unimaginable evil.

  Statistics 1 say:

  1.2 million children are trafficked every year; this is in addition to the millions already held captive by trafficking.

  Every two minutes a child is being prepared for sexual exploitation.

  Approximately 30 million children have lost their childhood through sexual exploitation over the last thirty years.

  The dentist I mentioned earlier in this chapter participated in one of our Joyce Meyer Ministries medical outreaches, which take place in third-world countries. They’re staffed by a few people who are on our payroll, but most of them are wonderful volunteers who take time off from work and pay their own expenses to go with us. They work twelve to sixteen hours a day, usually in places where the temperature is much higher than they are accustomed to with no air conditioning and perhaps no fan. They work in remote villages, under tents, and are able to help people who may not have ever received medical care of any kind. We are able to give them life-saving and pain-relieving medicines. We give them vitamins, feed them, and let them know that Jesus does indeed love them. Each one is given an opportunity to receive Jesus, and most of them choose to do so. I get tears in my eyes as I remember the doctors, dentists, nurses, and other medical aides who have told us with great emotion about how these trips changed their lives forever. We try to thank them and they end up thanking us for opening their eyes to what life is really all about.

  We took an accountant who works for our ministry on a trip to Cambodia, and although she often sees the media presentations about our outreaches, her life was really impacted by what she saw in person. She said: “I actually feel like I have been living in a bubble all of my life.” She meant that she had been isolated from reality, and I think most of us are. I realize that not everyone in the world will be able to go to a third-world country to see firsthand how people there are forced to live, but we can at least try to remember when we read about or see them on television that what we are seeing is actually happening to someone—many someones. God loves these people, and He is counting on us to do something about it.

  Malnutrition

  * * *

  Mehret sees the world from a different perspective. In Angacha, a small Ethiopian village, she does her best to keep up with the other children, but she’s simply not like all the rest.

  Mehret was born healthy, but each day as malnutrition ate away at her body, it caused her spine to grow more crooked, making it difficult to walk, impossible to run and play with friends. It also produced a large growth that protrudes from the right side of her back—too big to hide, and too painful to ignore. Her bones are weak, and so is she.

  If anyone knows Mehret’s pain, it is her father, Abeba. The one thing he wants more than anything is simply to feed his children… and make his precious daughter well again. If Mehret can begin receiving the nutritious food she needs, the deterioration process can be stopped. But right now, there is no hope in sight.

  Day after day, Abeba battles the guilt of not being able to feed his babies. He also knows that if something doesn’t change, Mehret’s condition will only get worse. Soon, she won’t be able to walk. And she will eventually die.

  Today, Mehret knows the pain of feeling hungry… and the pain of being different than all of the rest. And she knows that each new day will be a little more difficult than the one before.

  In partnership with International Crisis Aid, Joyce Meyer Ministries has begun providing Mehret the food she needs to live and to stop further spinal deterioration. But there are so many more precious young children… so many more like Mehret… who need our help to win this war against malnutrition.

  Statistics 2 say:

  Right now, an estimated 963 million people in the world go hungry.

  Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes—one child every five seconds.

  In 2006, about 9.7 million children died before they reached their fifth birthday. Almost all of these deaths occurred in developing countries—four-fifths of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two regions that also suffer from the highest rates of hunger and malnutrition.

  A Crack in the World’s Foundation

  It seems to me that the world system has a crack in its foundation, and we are all sitting idly by and watching it fall apart. If you listen carefully, you will hear people saying it everywhere: “The world is falling apart.” We hear it on the news and in general conversation. It seems everyone is talking about the injustice in the world. But talk without action solves nothing. My question is, “Who will revolt against injustice and work to make wrong things right?” I have decided that I will. I know several thousand others who have determined that they will do the same, but we need hundreds of thousands to join us in order to get the job done.

  Whatever You Can Do Is Worth Doing

  You may be thinking, Joyce, what I can do won’t even make a dent in the problems we have in the world. I know how you feel, because I once felt the same way. But if we all think that way, nobody will do anything and nothing will change. Although our individual efforts may not solve the problems, together we can make a major difference. God won’t hold us accountable for what we could not do, but He will hold us accountable for the things we could have done.

  I had recently returned from a trip to India and was at the gym when a woman I often see there asked me if I really believed that all the effort required for these trips was solving anything since millions would still be starving, no matter how many we fed. I shared with her what God placed in my heart—something that forever settled the issue for me. If you or I were hungry because we hadn’t eaten in three days and someone offered us one meal that would alleviate the pain in our stomachs for a day, would we take it and be glad to have it? Of course we would. And so are the people we help. We are able to set up continual-ca
re programs for many of them, but there will always be those we can only help once or twice. Still, I know that these outreaches are worth doing. If we can give one hungry child one meal, it is worth doing. If we can help one person go without pain for one day, it is worth doing. I have resolved to always do what I can do and to remember what God said to me, “If you can only relieve someone’s pain one time for one hour, it is still worth doing.”

  The World Has Lost Its Flavor

  I think it’s safe to say that most of what the world offers is tasteless—and I’m not talking about food. For example, most of the movies Hollywood produces are quite tasteless. A lot of the dialogue and many of the visual images are in poor taste. Usually when we see any type of behavior that is in poor taste we are quick to blame “the world.” We might say something like, “What is the world coming to?” Yet the term “the world” merely means the people who live in the world. If the world has lost its flavor, it is because people have become tasteless in their attitudes and actions. Jesus said that we are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses its flavor (its strength and quality), it is good for nothing (see Matt. 5:13). He also said that we are the light of the world and should not hide our light (see Matt. 5:14).

  Think of it this way: Each day as you leave your home to go into a dark, tasteless world, you can be the light and flavor it needs. You can bring joy to your workplace by being determined to consistently have a godly attitude. Through simple things like being thankful rather than complaining like most people do, being patient, merciful, quick to forgive offenses, kind, and encouraging. Even simply smiling and being friendly is a way to bring flavor into a tasteless society.

  I don’t know about you, but I don’t like bland food. My husband had a stomach problem once and the doctor put him on a totally bland diet for a few days. As I recall, he didn’t even look forward to eating. Dave is not a complainer, but at every meal, I heard him say over and over, “This stuff has no taste at all.” It needed a bit of salt, a little spice—and that is exactly what the world needs.

  Without love and all of its magnificent qualities, life is tasteless and not worth living. I want you to try an experiment. Just think: I am going to go out into the world today and spice things up. Then get your mind set before you ever walk out the door that you are going out as God’s ambassador and that your goal is to be a giver, to love people and add good flavor to their lives. You can begin by smiling at the people you encounter throughout the day. A smile is a symbol of acceptance and approval which is something that most of the people in the world desperately need. Deposit yourself with God and trust Him to take care of you while you sow good seed everywhere you go by making decisions that will be a blessing to others.

  Change Begins with You

  I realize that you can’t do everything; I don’t question that at all. You must say no to some things or your life will be filled with stress. I am not able to volunteer to tutor children or deliver meals to the elderly, but I am doing lots of other things to make a positive difference in the world. I think the question each of us must answer is, “What am I doing to make someone else’s life better?” And perhaps a better question is, “What have I done today to make someone else’s life better?”

  This book may be difficult to read at times because hopefully it will bring up issues that are uncomfortable. But they need to be addressed by each of us. Nothing good ever happens accidentally. If we want to be part of a revolution, that means things must change, and things cannot change unless people do. Each of us must say: Change begins with me!

  Nothing good ever happens accidentally. If we want to be part of a revolution, that means things must change, and things cannot change unless people do. Each of us must say: Change begins with me!

  LOVE REVOLUTIONARY

  Darlene Zschech

  The journey of the heart is one of the most complex mysteries there is. The elation and the sadness, the hoping and the waiting, the highs and the lows… and sadly for many, the unutterable disappointment that literally finds the heart in a place where it functions but does not want to feel anything anymore. When one is without an understanding of the great love of God to lean into and find strength, then the human heart finds a way to cope, to manage, to survive even the harshest of realities. And this is where countless amounts of people find themselves today, from the richest to the poorest, as poverty of the heart does not discriminate where it chooses to find a home.

  The prophet Isaiah talked about a radical love revolution in Isaiah 61:11, as the word describes a day in which love would result in people finding their due justice… and Jesus making a way through the wilderness. “For as [surely as] the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring forth, so [surely] the Lord God will cause rightness and justice and praise to spring forth before all the nations [through the self-fulfilling power of His word].”

  A Love Revolution is not only a great idea, but a concept of complete urgency… especially if we are believing to see the tragic injustices happening in the earth today be turned around… including the heaviest tragedy of them all, the tragedy of humanity’s broken heart.

  The brokenness is brought to our attention again and again as in the images of a young mother breastfeeding her baby, whose own body is sick and ravaged by the results of HIV/AIDS. She is doing her best but is faced with the choice… does she feed her child and knowingly infect her with this killer disease, or does she see the child starve for lack of alternative nutrition? This mum’s heart is way beyond broken. She is a mum just like me, filled with delight when given the opportunity to see her child flourish in her care.

  To see young men and women just standing around, with no food, no water, nowhere to go and nothing to do, this is heartbreaking to the core and fills hearts with constant disillusionment. Their hearts and minds are full of countless dreams, but if only they could find a way to get to school and buy something to eat.

  It’s amazing what desperation will cause people to do, causing further harm and extreme violence toward each other… how little value people place on a human life when faced with continued extreme poverty. But a heart can only handle so much ache.

  A fourteen-year-old boy is raising his younger brother and sister, and younger nephew, in a small tin-covered shack called a home in sub-Saharan Africa, where he works all day on a small crops farm, trying desperately to put them all, including himself, through school and find something for them all to eat to keep them strong every single day. His parents died due to HIV and their town excommunicated the children for the fear that they too had the disease. The odds are high, they are yet to be tested. And this fourteen-year-old extremely brave heart grows fragile due to unrelenting hard work, disease, and uncertainty.

  A young mum in Sydney, Australia, who has poured her life into her husband and children, only to find that her husband has been cheating on her for many, many months and wants to marry his new “find.” This woman feels isolated, devalued, humiliated, and now has to face a future not only without her husband but also many days without her children as the husband fights for his custody rights. Her heart is so broken that breathing is hard, and she cannot see the way forward.

  I remember sitting on the outskirts of Uganda with an incredible leader of one of the stunning child sponsorship programs based there, and as we got to talking, she began to share with me how even though they are doing much to help rescue orphans in that region, the amount of children in their immediate reach who are without the means to survive is overwhelming. I stood up and began to massage her tired shoulders as she continued to speak of her broken heart, and of her unrelenting frustration, and soon the words turned to sobs. Years of living with means stretched as far as they can humanly reach, yet watching and listening as children continue to go to bed hungry and lonely had caught up to this exhausted soul.

  The stories could keep coming from here to eternity, of people struggling to survive, from the depths of Africa to highly populated Asia, th
e US to Oz. It seems that wherever you look, there are major walls of insurmountable heartbreak that even with truckloads of food parcels and immunization, counselors, and community support, we need a lot more to break this treacherous cycle. A LOVE REVOLUTION… it is here that we find our life mission.

  Luke 4 sends the message out loud and clear:

  The spirit of the Lord is upon me BECAUSE

  He has appointed me to preach good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the downtrodden will be freed from their oppressors, and that the time of the Lord’s favour has come. (See Luke 4:18–19.)

  Every time I read and reread this passage, I am reminded to be focused and clear in our endeavors to lift the lives of others… from the smallest of gestures to the grandest of schemes… for this is our time to stand up, walk from the status quo, from a life purely of comfort and self, and stretch ourselves in any way we can to our brothers and sisters in need across the earth.

  There is a great word that truly is one of the most powerful words that love actually brings to life… and that word is HOPE. The word says… this hope we have, as an anchor for the soul (see Heb. 6:19)… and Psalm 39:7 says… “And now, Lord, what do I wait for and expect? My hope and expectation are in You.” Hope is always alive, even when the situation is bleak or seemingly impossible. Our mission is to bring that hope along with faith and love to hurting people.