Ever since I announced that I’m goin to be running 50 miles on my 50th birthday to set 50 women free from human trafficking, I’ve gotten a lot of strange looks.
Most of them have come from the face in the mirror.
What am I doing? Have I lost my mind?
(Please keep your answers to those questions to yourself.)
But without a doubt, the one question I’ve been asked the most is simply, “why?”
The answer to that question started in 2011, but wasn’t fully developed until the fall of 2015.
In 2011, I was on my 2nd trip to New Delhi, India, and in a frantic, last-minute “buy anything you can and pray to God the kids like it” shopping trip before getting on the plane to head home, I met her.
Well, she met me. She was about 9 years old – the same age as my daughter back home – and yet something was VERY different about this girl.
My daughter looked and acted like a 9-year-old. This girl looked and acted like a 29-year-old. It. Was. So. Bizarre.
She looked up at me with eyes that mesmerized me and asked if I wanted to by a necklace or 10, and I did. She was captivating, and quite possibly the best salesperson I’ve ever been around. And yet something was so off about the whole transaction, and when I got on the van to head to the airport, I asked about it.
That night I learned what you have surely realized by now: that girl HAD to sell those necklaces because she was trapped, and she had been taught how to carry herself like a woman instead of a girl because American men will fall for that stuff. And then I learned that if she wasn’t rescued from that situation soon, she’d be selling something far more personal than necklaces.
I arrived home and kept that picture.
I looked at my daughter differently the first night back, maybe even the first couple of nights back. But over time, without even realizing it, the jolt I’d experienced during that shopping sprint faded.
Until I saw her again in 2013. In the same spot. Still (thankfully) only selling necklaces, but still selling for someone else and with no option to stop. My heart broke again.
It wasn’t until the B99 pulled up a trailer for a movie called Nefarious that I even realized that the jolt was gone, but as we watched the images of young girls and women being trafficked and Wendy sat with tears streaming down her face, I felt…nothing.
NOTHING.
Why am I running 50 miles in a day? Because I refuse to DO NOTHING just because I might not FEEL SOMETHING.
I refuse to let APATHY rule me, and so I am running because it reminds me that to be part of a MOVEMENT, we must MOVE.
To be part of a MOVEMENT, we must MOVE. Share on XI’m running because my WIFE’S BURDEN matters to me, and this is one small way that I can honor what God is doing in her.
I’m running because I CAN and I’m praying that it will motivate others to do what THEY CAN.
I'm running because I CAN. I'm praying it motivates others to do what THEY CAN. Share on XSpeak up.
Stand up.
Donate.
Pray.
I’m hoping that you will be a part of giving a future to 50 women who only know a present from which they cannot escape.
If a lot do a little, it can change the world.
If you don’t believe that, I understand. I used to be you.
But now I’m not, and someday soon, you won’t be, either.
We’ll be the same. People with hearts that are broken because of a girl I met on the streets of New Delhi.
Someday, I pray I meet her again, on those same streets, grown up and…
Free.
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