I’ve been doing outreach into a few of the brothels of Jos
for the past eighteen months. In that time, I think two girls have left and
moved into our halfway house: Neither of them stayed. There are girls with whom
we have spoken time after time; girls who, every time we speak with them, are
planning on leaving the hotel and turning their lives around next week, next
month, next year……… and they’re still there.
Granted, a few girls leave the hotels, but we rarely know
where they go: Whether this is a positive step, or to an even darker place than
that they have left. The one’s who have left and are trying to set up a new
life, have so much working against them: So much temptation to fall back into
their own ways; their familiar routine.
As we step into the Hotels each week, we are aware that we
are stepping into a battlefield: Satan has a hold of these ladies, and the
dark, stinking, dishevelled hotels in which they live. It’s easy to get
discouraged in this ministry; easy to look at the ladies’ situations through
human eyes, and believe that there is no hope. It sometimes scares me how quick
I can be to feel the hopelessness of their situations, forgetting that we serve
the almighty God, and with Him there is always hope.
Each time I pray for this ministry, I thank God for all that
he is doing in the lives and hearts of the ladies we meet, but we rarely see
evidence of this beyond an uncomfortable shifting, or a few tears as we share
truth with them, and by the next week they either don’t want to know, or have
disappeared (we pray to a better place!)
Thankfully, this ministry is God’s, and not ours. We are His
workers, and all we need do is listen to Him, take up our shield of faith and
obey.
Precious reminded me of this. Precious is a lady, who lives
in the first Hotel we visit each week. In this Hotel live a number of ladies,
who we have spoken to time and time again, to what seems like little avail.
Every week is different, but in recent weeks we have frequently been in and out
of this hotel within five minutes, because they just don’t want to know; or so
it seems. Seriously, this is the only place I have ever been where sitting on a
stool listening music counts as being “busy” (or at least busy enough to not
have to speak with us).
Precious has been to our outreach centre before, and has
spoken with us in the hotel, but never showed us a response that convinced us
she was actually hearing what we had to say. That was until Wednesday.
We were doing our outreach the same as we do every week, and
were in this first hotel. Keesha, Rahab and I had walked through the whole
place and sat and spoken with one lady along the way. We were literally by the
exit, when we decided to greet the last girl on the corridor. Very little
conversation really took place, but when we asked her if she knew Jesus, her
response made me curious: “No. How can you know Jesus in this place?”
In a place where so many ladies will pay lip service to
being a “Christian”; sleep in rooms with bible verses and phrases declaring the
power and sovereignty of God on their walls, maybe put on some worship music
between watching pornographic movies, just acknowledging how far she was from
knowing Christ was significant. We told her that we agreed with her, and went
on to tell her briefly about our house. Immediately tears came to her eyes. “If
there is really a place like this I want to go.”
“Ok,” we said. “Pack your bags and we’ll take you there
now.”
I should probably mention at this point that we say this a lot.
This is usually the stage of the conversation at which they laugh, and begin to
tell us all the reasons why they can’t leave now, but of course they will allow
us to help them in one week / month etc etc.
However, when we said this to Precious, she actually started
packing!!! The three of us stood
nervously in the corridor outside her room, and all prayed that she would not
let anything get in the way of the decision she had just made! Over the next
little while there were so many times when I was convinced she was going to
change her mind, and just continued to pray that she wouldn’t. She didn’t, and
thirty minutes after we had first greeted her, Precious was sitting in the back
of my car on the way to the half way house!
Every day since then there has been reason to be encouraged
by Precious’s life. She truly desires to live a life glorifying to God, and is
growing in her understanding of what this means every day. Keesha, who works in
our ministry house, has been able to spend some time with her each day. The
testimony Precious has shared with her speaks of months of unhappiness, knowing
that she was not in a place where she could truly know Christ. Time after time
she cried out to God. Time after time she made plans to leave and something
would stop her: A friend would get sick, or she would just be short of the
money she thought that she needed to leave. The day we met with Precious in
that corridor, she was sitting there with a true desire to leave. A few days
later, when Keesha asked her what was going through her mind as she sat in the
car on the way to the house, Precious said that she was just repeating one
phrase over and over: “God, you have finally done it”.
Matthew 7 verse 7 says, “Ask, and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find; knock and the door will opened to you.” Precious asked,
and the door was opened. She did not leave that place through anything we ever
did in our own strength. It was all God. “God, You have finally done it!”
