Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, Part 1
January 12th, 2008 by Marc A. Pitman
Even though it’s mid-January, I’m still hearing a lot about New Year Resolutions. So I thought I might offer one for your consideration: working to end slavery.
Seriously.
There are currently around 27 million slaves on the planet. That’s more than the twice the total number of slaves taken from Africa in the 300 to 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.
27 million.
And I’m not refering to the kind of “slavery” we sort of joke about in our middle-class terminology, working for a hard boss or being up to our ears in consumer debt.
I’m talking about 27 million men, women, and children sold against their will into slavery with no hope of release. Men, women, and children forced into making rugs, rolling cigarrettes, making bricks. And more often that not being forced to have sex. “Rape for profit” as the International Justice Mission calls it.
Kids the age of all three of my kids: 2, 5, and 8. It’s sickening.
And I don’t really know what to do about it.
But God’s had my wife and I on a steep learning curve for the last few months. Human trafficking and sex trafficking books and articles keep finding their way to us.
What’s shocking is that slavery is so involved in so much of our normal life here in the USA. It’s even involved with much of the chocolate we eat.
I do know I can ask God to keep at me until I overcome my apparent indifference.
And I can support groups like International Justice Mission and others. (I’d love to figure out how my fundraising experience could be used to help them!)
Other Possibly Related posts:
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under church planting and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 12th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Ok, I have a lots of thoughts on this one… you have caught my attention!
In my opinion, one of the biggest things we can do on a daily basis is to make our voice heard with our wallets. And I am not talking about donating money to good causes (although that can help), I am talking about very carefully scrutinizing how we spend our money.
We in the western world think it is our right to buy whatever we want at the cheapest price we can find (I am guilty of this just as much as the next person). We give tons of thought about the image we want to portray by purchasing a particular product. We rarely think about what values we have promoted by giving a company money for that product. We think that being a good steward of our money means being cheap (shopping at Wal-Mart?), when in fact I would argue that being a good steward of our money means paying a fair price for the things we need. Paying a fair price means that everyone is fairly compensated for and taken care of along the way, including the environment.
For me, this means that if the true cost of an environmentally friendly chocolate bar without slavery is $5 (or $10 or whatever), then so be it. Paying a higher price for quality goods that promote my values means that I will value my money more, buy less things that I don’t really need, and spend more time actually thinking about where my money goes.
Well, that’s probably enough for now!
January 13th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
[...] « Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, Part 1 [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 10:51 am
[...] the last couple days, I’ve been looking at how was can work to end slavery. (See Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, Part 1 and Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, Part 2 to catch [...]