Escaping the Devil's Bedroom

What if this was your church?

Harmony Dust of Treasures allowed me to share this story with you:

"We have recently been in contact with Crystal (not her real name), a 21-year-old mother of two who has been dancing [in a strip club] since she was just 15 years old.  She has experienced her fair share of tragedy and heartache..."

"About two weeks ago, she made the decision to start going to church in her small town where she hoped to develop her relationship with God. She found a church where she received the love and prayers of the pastor and his wife.  Unfortunately, not everyone in the congregation shared their heart towards her. 

"A couple of days ago, two women from the church who found out what she does for a living, showed up on her doorstep and explained that they did not feel comfortable with this young girl putting her children in children’s ministry with their children.  Tremendously hurt and devastated, Crystal called her pastor to tell him what happened.  He assured her that the women were out of line and that he would speak to them about the matter.

"A few hours later, 6 women showed up at her doorstep threatening her, 'The next time you go running to the pastor will be your last!'

"Crystal was overwhelmed with feelings of anger.  It took everything in her to resist the temptation to turn her anger inward and harm herself. She once again called the pastor and his wife who offered their sincere regrets and support.

"The next morning, Crystal woke up to find that her car had been vandalized.  Someone had painted “Whore, Prostitute, Slut” and other names too vile to repeat.  The paint was removable, the words are not.

"Crystal told me that she doesn’t want to see anything come in the way of her love of God and her desire to know Him.  But she is beginning to wonder if she has the guts to go to church and face the judgment she has been experiencing.  And I don’t blame her.  Even as she was telling me what happened, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs in frustration! 

"Where is the love?  Where is the heart of Jesus in all of this?  Have we forgotten that he is the same Jesus extended compassion and mercy to an adulterous woman that the religious people of his day wanted to stone?  He is the same Jesus that challenged, 'If anyone of you is without sin, let him cast the first stone.' 

"NOBODY COULD!  None of us can today either. They all walked away. Every single one of them.  And Jesus looked at the woman in her shame and showed her love and mercy.

"We are His ambassadors.  We are His hands and feet.  How will people know that He is a God of love and grace if WE do not show them?  It is the goodness of God that leads us to change our ways….not the condemnation of people.

"My heart aches over what this young woman has been going through. I wonder if most of us would have the guts to go to church after experiencing something like she has. Would you?  Could you?

"I know that there are many churches, many leaders, many people throughout this world that are representing the heart of God in a sincere way. This gives me hope because we have a job to do.  There are hurting Crystal’s all around us.  People who have felt isolated and rejected. People who WANT to come to church, but they are afraid…not of God, but of US.

"Let us never forget that our greatest command is to love God with all of our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves. (Mark 12:29-31)

"Are you up for it?

"PS.  As I am writing this I just received a call from Crystal who just had a 'chance' encounter with a woman who pastors a church with her husband in Crystal’s area.  Knowing nothing about what Crystal has been through this week, the woman invited Crystal to church and encouraged her that it was a safe place for people to come regardless of their lifestyle.  She mentioned that many of the people have come from backgrounds of addiction and prostitution.  His love never fails!"

Harmony's next email update reported: "Crystal has been going to the new church where she has found a very loving and supportive community of people. Tonight she will [share] what God has been doing in her life with a small group of women, including a couple other girls who work in strip clubs in her area!"

Photo courtesy of Phil Kenyon

A Monday in Amsterdam

On a drizzling Monday night in Amsterdam last month, I walked along lantern-lit cobble-stone streets and canals in the Red Light district. Although it was a weekday after 9 p.m., the streets were filled with throngs of passersby ogling at the scantily-clad young women who stood in the windows as if they were animals at the zoo. After my initial shock at the women's "come-hither" poses and their heavily painted faces, I began noticing the onlookers. They weren't only leering and lusty young men who stopped to window-shop. Couples strolled hand-in-hand and grandfatherly and grandmotherly figures took in the "sights." Other than the absence of children, all of humanity seemed to be out for a stroll in the city's central Red Light district. Then I realized that my picture of the zoo was inside-out. In fact, it was we on the streets, the people ones strolling by, who were more the animals, feeding fallen appetites for bizarre spectacles and fantasy on the women behind the windows.

I was accompanied by Toos, who oversees the Scarlet Cord (scroll down to Scharlaken Koord) with her husband, Willem. She tapped on windows and doors, introducing herself with a friendly hello and letting the women know they were welcome at the Scarlet Cord if they ever needed help. The first door we knocked at was opened by a young Hungarian girl who looked younger than 20 and spoke only a little Dutch. Unlike the other women, her freckled face bore little if any make-up, and instead of cheap lingerie, she wore a modest white and silver polka dot two-piece swimsuit. My stomach dropped when she said her name was "Lucy." Perhaps that wasn't her real name, but it didn't matter. My husband and I have chosen that name for our baby, if she is a girl. I felt my own comfortable world crashing into the horrors of the world's flesh trade through this one girl. All the women in the 300-some brothels here could be my daughter!

"How long, O Lord, will we be silent and complicit? Lord, in your mercy, hear our cry..."  - excerpt from a prayer of lament for sexual exploitation from NCAP

I'll never know Lucy's story, but I am confident she didn't grow up dreaming of becoming an object in the window. More likely, she's one of many young women who fit a common profile. Perhaps her father was an alcholic or abusive, then her mother became sick and needed hospitalization or medication. With younger siblings at home, and few local job prospects, Lucy enlisted to work abroad as an "exotic dancer" or "nanny". Or maybe she even knew she'd 'work' in a window, but she probably imagined she'd earn piles of money to send back home for her family. She never knew the violence and suffering almost certain to come.

What can we do to help?
Pray for Lucy to be receptive to God's love.
Pray for the ministries of the Scarlet Cord and YWAM's Cleft.
Check out options on the Salvation Army's website.

"Treasures out of Darkness"

A couple weeks ago I spoke with Harmony Dust (left in photo, click to enlarge), founder of Treasures, an L.A. ministry that reaches women in the sex industry. Harmony had a tumultuous childhood. She was sexually abused by two women at age 5 and an older boy at 7, and then raped repeatedly by an ex-boyfriend as a teen. "I had a really low sense of self-worth and my identity was strongly intertwined with my sexuality," she told me.

While Harmony was in college, she started dancing at the Century Lounge, a strip club near the L.A. airport. She was desperate for money to support her abusive boyfriend, his baby and the baby’s mother. At the club, men propositioned her every night, but Harmony created firm boundaries for herself–she’d never let an customer touch her, although many tried (Glamour Magazine, January 2007). "I was so unhappy. The pain was suffocating," she said. Other dancers caved in to pressure to sleep with regular customers, managers or club owners.

In a ballet class at Santa Monica College, Harmony became friends with Tanya, a young woman with a sparkling personality. Although she initially lied when Tanya asked about her job, the next week Harmony decided to be honest. Tanya’s reaction stunned her: "She didn’t judge me...She blew every preconceived notion of what I thought Christians were out of the water."

Tanya invited Harmony to her church, Oasis Christian Center. When Harmony finally visited and took her first step inside of a church, she loved it. She quickly became a regular at Oasis on Sundays, then on Mondays and Wednesdays for Bible studies. "There was a lot of instability in my life and I was looking for a home, an anchor," she said.

Six months later Harmony was still going to Oasis and dancing at the Century Lounge. On Wednesday nights, she’d go to church, then head straight to work. But, "I began to understand my value and purpose," she said. And Tanya allowed time for the Holy Spirit to work. "She never said, ‘Now that you’re going to church, you gotta change,’" Harmony told me.

Harmony said good-bye to the Century Lounge the night she realized that God was asking her to leave. She also severed ties with her boyfriend and sought healing. Eventually she married a godly man from Oasis and graduated from UCLA with a Masters in Social Work.

In 2000, Harmony followed a dream to reach women still trapped in the sex industry and headed back to the Century Lounge. Now, once a month she leads groups of young Christian women to clubs across L.A., visiting more than 100 each year. They distribute gift bags and messages that testify to God’s power to create "treasures out of darkness" (Isa. 45:3). Many women in clubs have responded.

Read more about Treasures

Tatooed for Jesus

Edna, 44, is a former schoolteacher and a homeschooling mom in Texas. Recently she told me about her visits to local strip clubs. For the last five years, she's been frequenting different clubs with teams of women who hope to reach the girls there for Jesus.

Edna noticed that many girls who dance in the clubs sport tatoos. As she made small talk with them in the dressing rooms, she realized that the tatoos could open doors to talking about Jesus. Although Edna already had a small cherub tatooed to her upperback, she wanted one with a clear message about how Jesus had changed her life.

After praying about it for a year, Edna was ready for the second tatoo. On her lower back, a flowery script spelled "Forgiven." She couldn't wait to go into a club, approach a girl and tell her, "I like your tatoo. Let me show you mine."

But the next time Edna visited a club, she almost completely forgot about her tatoo. When she finally remembered and showed it to one girl, Edna told me, "she got this really blank look on her face, Like, 'What does that mean?'  I thought it was a blank look, but she was blown away.

"That girl called me weeks later and said, 'That tatoo on your back was a sign because I was raised in the church and I know what that means.' That same girl stopped dancing in the strip club."

I've never been in a strip club and I don't have any tatoos, so how could I relate to these girls? I asked Edna, "Would the right outfit help?"

"If God wants you in there, He’s picking you, know matter what," she told me. Once a grandmotherly woman accompanied her team into the clubs, which the girls loved.

"I think a lot of girls like me because I'm the mom who goes in and talks to them when their own mom doesn’t," Edna said. All of the girls she's talked to have suffered from absentee mothers. 

Do you pass any strip clubs on your daily commute? Say a prayer for the girls inside, that God sends someone to incarnate Christ's love to them. And whisper a prayer for Edna and her ministry.

Porn and Pancakes

That's the title of a recent Yahoo article that caught my eye in a friend's email (thanks, Deann!). So, before I get back to Julia's story (last post), it's "porn and pancakes" today. I am so relieved that a church in upstate New York is hosting this event to address the pervasiveness of porn.

Imagine, talking about porn addictions over coffee, a stack of cakes dripping with syrup, in your church fellowship hall! I hope we all have the opportunity someday. The power of porn grows in the darkness. It's the dirty little secret that your and my cousin, colleague, father or spouse wouldn't likely admit to. But it's also the start of sexual addictions that ultimately feed prostitution and sex trafficking.

So, thank goodness for this church, who's willing to tackle the topic head-on and bring it into the light! And, for the group of youth ministries from Triple-X Church, traveling the country to help us bring this darkness before God.

Do you know anyone struggling with a porn addiction? Does your church have a means of helping those struggling with porn?

I was tired of being a slave of Satan

I met Julia* in Sao Paolo, Brazil. A Brazilian of Japanese descent, she looked like one of my aunts with her black bob and petite frame. I tried out my Japanese on her and managed to win an ounce of trust, in part through our shared heritage.

Julia was 15 when she was raped by a group of boys at her high school. They shoved her in a car and bruised her neck while forcing themselves on her. "I was very afraid for a long time," she recalls. Julia visited a hospital because of the excruciating pain and inflammation, but she never told her mother what had happened. The two didn't get along.

At 20, Julia left home and found herself in Luz, a neighborhood in Sao Paulo known for drugs and prostitution. She was invited into an apartment building where she met many women. At first she didn't realize it was a brothel, and that a woman in the building was pimping all the other women living there.

Julia learned the trade quickly. "I was new, pretty, and I made a lot of money although I was infected," she told me. The other women encouraged her to spend her money with them at bars, drinking and dancing. Sometimes the men who paid to use her body made promises they never kept.

Fifteen years passed in the brothel before Julia was thrown out onto the streets, and began prostituting herself in hotels. On the street, she met Paolo Cappilletti, director of CENA, a ministry devoted to reaching homosexuals, transvestites and prostituting women and men. For 8 years, Paolo shared the Gospel with Julia. And for 8 years, Julia ignored him.

I thought it was nonsense. He talked about Jesus, but everytime I had another reason why I didn’t want to seek Jesus. I was drinking and smoking cigarettes. I was depressed, I was empty inside.

But after 23 years of selling her body, Julia was tired of suffering. "I was tired of being a slave of Satan," she said.

To be continued...

*Julia is not her real name.