Carry the Cross

But, about 8 years ago, I encountered the reality of child sex-slavery.  I’m not only talking about Southeast Asia.  I mean I discovered that there are 2,000,000 child sex slaves the world over, and 100,000 children are right here in the United States of America, raped up to 20,000 times before their 15th birthday.  The FBI has rescued girls as young as 6 years old.  There are more slaves now than during the trans-Atlantic slave trade (20-40 million including labor-slaves of all ages.)  Even then, I never entered into doubt of the divinity of Christ…but my despondency reached such a low that I had believed that humanity had fully lost God’s favor.  Not to sound blasphemous, but Jesus—haven’t these girls suffered more than you?  If so, there is no hope.  I really began to believe that.  If God the Father was going to sit back and watch, I would go Boondocks Saints on these monsters who tortured 12 year olds in almost every American city.
Well, I never went Boondocks, even though I owned a gun.  Eight years later, I found myself gun-less and on the board for Children of the Immaculate Heart, a Catholic home for teen survivors which should open late 2015.  I recently went out to California for our fundraising event, and I met a chaplain who is working with these girls in juvenile hall.  (Yes, though innocent, these precious children are kept in “juvy” until more homes are opened.)  He shared this poem that came from a young girl who had been rescued from sexual slavery, here in America.  This is just an excerpt:

But I am a survivor
I found myself in Jesus
I carried His cross, and He carried mine
I am a survivor

I was down, but not out
I fell but got up
They beat me but I didn’t quit
I am a survivor

I am a worshipper
I am strong
I am determined to reach the top
I am brave to go through all that
I am a survivor

Did you catch that part?  I carried His cross, and He carried mine.  She wrote that about when she was “just a kid,” as another line from her poem goes.  If anyone would have a desire to say either God was not-good, or God was not-powerful, it’s her.
But she didn’t.  She believes in the Cross and the Resurrection and she keeps going in life.  That was clearly not the poem of someone brainwashed into Christianity at a vulnerable point in her life.  For me, it became living proof that only the Cross of Jesus Christ could bring hope and meaning to a girl who was raped probably thousands of times.  She saw that God the Father had not abandoned Jesus; He had not abandoned her.  They both suffered unjustly.  She had not suffered more than Jesus, because Jesus had suffered every drop of it in her.  She taught me, by her poem, what I had failed to see.  It was I who was stupid, or at least blind in my faith, when compared with her.
So, why did God wait so long to vindicate His own Son on the Cross and even longer to rescue His daughter who wrote that poem?  As the late, great Fr. Groeschel would say:  “God’s not in the business of stopping evil, but He is in the business of turning evil into good.”  I have to wonder:  What would this  “business of stopping evil” really look like from God’s point of view?  I think He would have to incinerate our entire planet (at least as long as free-will continues.)  But there’s another option.  Jeff Bridges as The Giver explains why free-will-gone-awry is still worth the risk for human beings to live free:  “If you could only see the possibility of love, of love…” he says, as the camera pans between a baptism and a dying man, a wedding and a war scene.  In other words, man’s ability to choose war is a necessary prerequisite to be able to choose to dance at a wedding.  Yes, for God too, apparently the love that is chosen by a few saints and poets is somehow worth enduring the evil perpetrated by the wicked.  “If you could only see the possibility of love.”
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