Sitting in the same room with a victim of trafficking and 3 of her traffickers is an eerie experience. Today I did just that. I never spoke with them, but I listened and I learned. The 3 traffickers were sentenced in a federal court to years in prison for their abuse and exploitation of this teenager.
I looked at these people and thought, "How could you be this capable of such horrible evil?" They looked like any normal person you'd pass on the street. I saw their families crying for them. The ring leader even had a family and young children! I feel for the kids who will reap the consequences of their father's terrible choices and pray that they do not follow his path. He will be in prison for the next 20 years.
But what touched me most was the courage of a teenage girl who had the strength to testify against her captors, people she had trusted who turned on her. In today's sentencing, she bravely shared how she has been recovering from the drug addiction the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by her traffickers. She is still in counseling but is growing. She will have a different life if she carries such courage with her into her future. I believe she will because to stand in the courtroom with the very people who abused her took guts, and she may have more than anyone I have ever met. I admire her.
In the span of a few minutes, I witnessed human strength on two ends of the spectrum. On one end was strength used to degrade someone for selfish greed. On the other was strength used for justice, to make things right (righteousness). God was in that courtroom today giving His strength to this teenager. He was also present, bringing justice and restoring order to a broken world. The justice system in our country may not be perfect, but today was a good day. Today, traffickers went to prison for a long time and will no longer be able to exploit and abuse children.
Now we pray for this soft-spoken teen's continued healing and restoration but we also pray for those entering federal penitentiaries. We pray that God would intervene in their lives, that they would truly repent and their hearts would be changed by grace. We pray for them knowing that, if the circumstances were different in our lives, we could have made the same horrible choices, and we praise God for His grace in our lives that kept us from that path.
