A Girl Under the Light

I must say that this is probably the heaviest thing I've posted yet but with that being said this was probably what hit me the hardest while we were in Toronto, what I wrestled the hardest with. It was the scene that you will read below that continually brought tears to my eyes that have been a dry well for quite some time and it was the ending thought of this post that continues to break my heart as I look at and see my own brokenness and pain and yearn for the wholeness that I was born to live out of.

Our first night in Toronto we walked around for quite some time, seeing the city and many of its inhabitants. We walked past the gay district, the transvestites, the prostitutes, the homeless, and we saw all of the different cultures living together. At the end of the night we stopped next to a church and our leader started talking to us about what we saw and experienced; all the while he was talking I was staring over his shoulder at the girl across the street probably about 20 years of age, dressed in all white with high heels that I could never even imagine walking in. I watched her as she walked up and down the street and then settled standing by a lamp post. My heart began to break as I realized that this girl around my age wasn’t simply out for a nighttime stroll the way I was, nope she was “on the clock” she was waiting for her next “customer” to drive by so she could be picked up and in exchange for money give what it was that I’m sure was all she thought she had to offer… as she sold herself. My eyes began to well up as our leader asked what it was that really hit us that night that was hard for us to swallow. After a minute or so of trying to wrap my mind around it all, to grasp on to some form of reality in this world that has suddenly been turned so around I no longer knew where it was that I was standing, I began to explain to the group that for me it was these girls selling themselves on the street, something I’d always heard happened but never watched and truly thought about. Our leader, having spent much time in Toronto observing, contemplating, and wrestling with everything we were seeing, began lovingly and compassionately agreeing and asking us rhetorically asking, “but what does redemption look like for them?” Saying the only way to get them out of it is to take them straight off the street and into your home and to keep them there. He then proceeded to explain though that the thing about that is they may end up back here anyways because this is how they knew life, where their pimps assured their safety, their housing, their food. That this was the place they found their worth, their care; they knew how to operate in this system they felt loved in it… they were bound to it, they’d most likely been doing it since they landed on the streets as teenagers and it was all they knew. This brutal depressing reality began to set in to my heart just as I looked over again at the girl and a car with a male driver pulled up and she jumped in…

About 40 minutes later I laid in my bed, tucked in, still in shock as I thought about where that girl lay right now… A horrible, mind-numbing reality and yet I can’t help to look at it now and think about all the people who I know, who I am friends with, who I walk with daily whose stories aren’t that different. Sure its not to that degree, its not complete strangers who drive up to them and they don’t receive money at the end and there aren’t multiples in a night and it doesn’t happen night after night but still… how many times was it in college, how many people do I know who would have a random hookup? How is that that different? How are my friends that different than these girls on the streets? They’re just as broken, just as lost, believe just as many lies about themselves, they’re just as desperate to find something they can hold on to, something that will care about them, if not forever then just for one night. Not selling themselves for money but rather for the pleasure of ignoring reality for just a little while; to forget about the ex they just broke up with, to forget about the guy they “weren’t good enough for,” to forget about a dad who was never around to show love and care… to be so caught up in the moment that just for a little while you feel secure again, safe… ignoring the fact that in an hour or two they’ll be back on the “street corner” where all the realities exist again. I’m not saying that the prostitutes enjoy the act by any means like my friends may but in both cases I believe that this is the only way either person knows how to survive… I don’t know how to swallow either scenario…