Prayer for New Ideas…
Well, today is the first day I have actually been able to get out of the house and DO something besides just walk the dogs! Last week, even just to take a shower was like a huge accomplishment for me – that flu bug really hit me and Daryl both pretty hard. I STILL have a horrible hacking cough and have had to take NyQuill twice every night for the last week and a half, including last night… if I don’t want to keep Daryl up and if I want to get any sleep at all. But praise God, at least today I have felt good enough to actually make it out of the house in something other than my pajamas!
Anyway, I went to breakfast with a friend in charge of Nightlight LA, and it was so great just to sit down and talk about some stuff since we’ve been back from Bangkok. A couple weeks from now, she has a team of college kids from South Dakota that are coming to LA and she’d like me to teach our “Reaching out to Pimps and Prostitutes” class, share a bit of my testimony and afterwards take them down to Skid Row and show them where I slept! Lol.
We were talking about somehow working together, because we have the same heart to help women out of sex-trafficking/prostitution and get a place for them – like a drop in center or someplace where we could build relationships with kids or women in the lifestyle… we talked about somehow wanting to get law enforcement involved in such a way that we could ‘educate’ them – it would be so awesome of they would come to our class about the Game and some of the dynamics that go on out on the street… to communicate to them somehow, that the women out there are NOT out there because they want to be – something led them up to making the decision to be out there…
There are so many people, including and probably even more so police officers (I’d imagine it’s difficult not to get jaded and calloused) see prostitutes just as “Ho’s” – out there by choice – when in fact, many are trafficked – if not by force, by manipulation and mind control… and as always, we want to ‘humanize’ both the prostitutes AND the pimps. But we’d also like to try and find a way so that a law can be passed so that a pimp can get busted in ways other than just crossing over state lines with a known prostitute – it is SO DIFFICULT for pimps to get caught and charged for pimping/pandering – why is that? There has to be a way… I wish that if a guy is suspected of pimping that it would be required that they go to a class to learn about the damage prostitution does to a woman, how they end up vulnerable to becoming a prostitute, and teach them how VALUABLE both men and women are.
It’s not like we’d like to just throw pimps into jail or prison if they get caught – just like throwing a young girl or woman into YA or jail for prostituting – that doesn’t do much to help them – if anything, it just hardens them and they just go back out and do the same thing if not worse. There needs to be some inner healing that takes place – people do NOT just wake up and decide to be a pimp or prostitute one day – circumstances, situations and life experiences have brought them to where they are today. I want to be able to do more than just hand out gift bags and tell the women that God loves them – something more ‘tangible’….
I just finished reading “Not for Sale” by Dave Batstone – and I know that God is speaking to me about going forward, stepping up another level… this starts with prayer, and we also need to have a team of intercessors that we can have praying regarding everything I just wrote about above. I feel that the Lord wants us to get more young people (18-25 year olds) involved in what we’re doing also. Maybe not so much going out on the streets with us – or maybe so – if they are trained up. It is younger people who are motivated and who have fresh new ideas… there are so many things going on in my head right now, so many things I’d love to do but I just don’t know where to get started… we need PEOPLE – dedicated committed people.
Please pray – we should be non-profit status within the next few months – we need to finish up the bylaws and pay the IRS – and then hopefully we can work on getting grants, some kind of funding. We know that we cannot do this on our own – what we want to do is way to big for us – it’s going to have to be the Lord, for sure!!! Like Pastor Tommy Barnett always says, “If it’s too big for you, it’s got to be the Lord!”
