Now For Something Serious

A month, or so, ago I started watching Who Do You Think You Are? on Hulu.com. The concept of the show is that celebrities trace their ancestry. I wish it was normal people finding out extraordinary things about where they came from. I guess that would be too much to ask from our culture, though, huh?

Anyway...One of the celebrities was Emmit Smith, the football player. One of the things that was done was a genetic test to find out the area of Africa that his ancestors came from. The country was Benin. He traveled to Benin to see what it is like and to see the old slave trading places. When he was there, he met a man who runs a school for children who have been rescued from slave traders. Emmit Smith seemed surprised to hear that slave trading is still going on in Benin.

Since then, I have seen article after article on the subject. I have a friend who started a ministry in China which helps women get out of prostitution. Many of them were sold, essentially as slaves, by their families. One of the men who ministers regularly in our church spoke briefly on Sunday about the sex industry in Houston and the people who work in it, who were sold into slavery, in their own countries, to be sold here, in America.

Slavery was not eradicated in the 1800's. It was made illegal, and the industry moved underground. The majority of people who are sold into slavery now, are women and children. They are made slaves in fields, houses, brothels and factories. They are kidnapped and sold by their own families.

Looking up statistics is difficult and overwhelming. It is hard to know which organizations to trust, given their track record in other areas (I'm referring to the UN.) And when you look at the numbers that are published, they vary widely. One report that I read said that 4 to 27 million people are slaves. Compare that to the 4 million legal slaves in the US before the Civil War. It is impossible to know exact numbers of modern slave trafficking, because the nature of crime is that it is secretive.

What I do know is that the Lord has not shown me all these things for nothing. Jesus came to this earth to set captives free. And He told His followers that they would do greater things than He did. National and International bureaucracy are not going to solve this issue. Only the love of Messiah in each of us will.