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| Credit:Edwin Koh © 2015 OM International |
At 10.30pm last Friday night, our team stepped out of the OM
office building, onto the dimly lit streets of Lorong 16. Lost and uncertain
(half of us were new to this area, let alone street work), we clutched out baskets
containing small gift packs- tissues, a notepad and biscuits, tightly. Despite
orientation and prayer, I still wondered how I would know what to say. Would I
be able to convey the gospel fully? How would I start the conversation? What if
it got awkward? What if I got trafficked?!
I struggled a lot with finding the right words, sometimes any words, to say. Thankfully, the gift packets proved precious in becoming the first exchange that opened the way to further conversation. Whether this was listening to their struggles (the lady boys were especially chatty), a short “here you go, God bless you,” or the amazing chance to be able to pray for people, you took whatever you could get. We cheered silently at every pimp that let us pass their girl a letter (http://www.fathersloveletter.com/text.html), for every street worker who could speak our language, and especially at the chance to pray God’s truth into people’s lives.
I struggled a lot with finding the right words, sometimes any words, to say. Thankfully, the gift packets proved precious in becoming the first exchange that opened the way to further conversation. Whether this was listening to their struggles (the lady boys were especially chatty), a short “here you go, God bless you,” or the amazing chance to be able to pray for people, you took whatever you could get. We cheered silently at every pimp that let us pass their girl a letter (http://www.fathersloveletter.com/text.html), for every street worker who could speak our language, and especially at the chance to pray God’s truth into people’s lives.
The pace and nature of our interactions were so different to
what I was used to having with other students and friends. This was a different
world, a marginalized, abused, forgotten world. Though as the night went on, I saw
that their struggles with identity, hopelessness and poverty, were things I
knew too, just in different dimensions. I prayed to dig deeper, that God would
increase and that my selfish guarding of my comfort zone would decrease.
I realized that if I was to really love them, it had to be
more than a transactional kind of love. Not a package deal, “Ok nice life story
but (I don’t have time to really care so) basically, here’s what you
need: the gospel, do this, this, this, read this and keep doing these things.
Call me if you need help. Oh and, God loves you!” Such transactional “love”, was
what the men who sought out these prostitutes walked the streets for. Can you
imagine Jesus having that conversation?
Although seeing customers haggle with pimps, putting a price
on someone else’s daughter made me sick, at the same time I know we too are guilty
of trading God’s love for a cheaper version of it.
In my evangelistic zeal, the goal to be a faithfulgospelwitness overtook the
necessity of knowing God (not just about God) and helping
these ladies do the same. I too had fallen into the trap of treating people as
things to be bought or won, or trophies to be collected instead of feasting on
the delight of relationships, believing things could be as good as God designed
them to be. How good it is that despite our sin, our God is a personal God, who
comes down to be with us and draws us to Him. What more that His love is so wide,
long, high and deep, it goes beyond what we can know!
C.S. Lewis says that we resist God because we misunderstand
his demands. We fail to see that what can appear to be an unwelcome, sometimes painful intrusion
into our lives is really the result of a love that is too great[1]
for us. As we grow in grace and knowledge of God, I pray we will look at the
world through heaven’s eyes, believe that He really does love us so much, and
then love the way he loves. By faith, we can and will step out into the
Geylangs of our lives that God is calling us to.
Further reading: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/true-holiness-befriends-sinners
[1] Those Divine demands which sound to
our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover,
in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He
demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. … We are bidden to ‘put on
Christ’, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to
give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are
embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. C.S.
Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996), pp.
46-47.
