On Fire

I am in Bangkok, Thailand.

Oh. my. God. I'm in Bangkok, Thailand.

I flew over Canada, the North Pole (*checks off: Saw the midnight sun on bucket list*), Russia, China, South Korea, and now I'm in Thailand. There are still two more hours of waiting in the Bangkok airport (which, in itself, is a mini-country) and five more hours of flying until I reach my final destination, Chiang Rai. But that's fine; the next seven hours will give me a chance to process all that I have seen already.

My dad (who is escorting me) and I landed here last night at around 10-ish p.m. While we were still in the air, I saw the very first light below me on the ground (because it had been pitch black, Bangkok is the starless, moonless city), every fact concerning the sex trade I've ever learned ("more than twenty-seven million people worldwide are victims of slavery--more than in the days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. ...Half of all victims of modern slavery are children" etc.), every face I've grown to put on those facts (Nhu, 146, the teenage girls in Posmus not much older than myself), the inhuman stories, the horror stories, the heartbreaking stories--they all rose up to meet me as I descended and impacted me harder than our whale of a plane I was in meeting the runway strip after flying 581 miles per hour for five hours.

In my mind, every neon light I could see in the distance represented a child, a girl, a boy, a man, a woman I knew was out there being sold at that very moment. Soon the only thought I could maintain was, Where is It? "It." The Red Light District. I wished then that I knew how close or far away I was from it... I found out the next morning that I as I slept in my hotel room, I was only a mere exact twenty-eight minutes away. Twenty-eight.
Honestly, I was afraid of it, nervous of coming even a continent's span near it, like it was The Plague or something. And yet, something inside of me wanted to run to it; wanted to pick up and embrace every single girl, boy, woman, baby, and man that The Plague was victimizing. Who cares if they were shunned by society like lepers? I had nothing to fear, really. The darkness around them could not infect me, I could hold them and never grow sick.
"This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." -1 John 1:5
I have only been in Chiang Rai, Thailand for less than two days, and yet the Lord is already revealing to me so much that I will need to know if I'm going to be here. The scales are falling from my eyes, and what once was seen through a fog and unclear is now made clear. The straight up God truth is that no matter where you are, no matter what situation you're in, when the darkness is all around and covering everything and is at its very darkest, a light, even a small one, shines all the more brighter. There's nothing else like it. From the moment I stepped off the plane, giving the next two months completely to the grace and mercy of the Lord, I didn't feel intimidated. Scared, yes. But not intimidated. I felt bold. Courageous, even. Absolutely on fire.