I can still see them, all of them, face by face. They stand, side by side, glancing up and down at you, taking you in. I feel taken in. I feel exposed. Their looks are a mix of fear, hatred, hurt, and need. I’m not sure what to do with myself, and I look away awkwardly, continuing my run home. I am in my jogging shorts and tank top, they are all clothed in worn silk dresses or scanty shorts and low-cut necklines. These girls line the bars and clubs along the Garapan Strip in Saipan. Heading back from a market night or from my routine jog, I pass these innocents as the sun is setting just off shore.
I wake up in a cold sweat, breathing hard, disoriented. I’m in dorm room #602, Foreman Hall. My room mate sleeps beneath me. I know immediately that I’ve had the dream again, and I set my head back down on my pillow and try to clear my mind of the pictures. I can still see them. All of them. Face by face. Soul by soul. They stare into my soul and ask me what I’m living for. My heart stutters, and I don’t know what to say. I am at a loss for words. How do you tell a battered heart and a cynical mind that there’s more? It’s harder than they say it is in Sabbath School. “WWJD?” is harder to apply than your Youth Pastor said it would be. As those young girls stared at me, I knew that no words I possessed could ever lead them from their prison of prostitution into the sunlight of love.
My mind would start to argue with me: I was a Student Missionary, wasn’t I? What was I doing if wasn’t helping people who couldn’t help themselves? What was I here for anyway? Wake up, Sacha! There are people in pain lining these streets and you just keep jogging!? Then logic would fight back: I’m here to teach. I’m teaching 1st and 2nd Grade at Saipan SDA School. That’s what I’m doing. I’m reaching that group of people, those hurt souls, and the innocent hearts in my class room.
Now I find myself awake night after night, seeing faces that I passed by day after day... and I can’t tear away. I keep asking myself what I should have done. I keep re-thinking my words and my thoughts; trying to put something together that could touch these broken slaves in a sexual world. I feel their pain, their hurt, and their need; I cry for their hatred and fear. It’s extremely inconvenient. I don’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now... Oh how I wish I knew. Oh how I wish I had known.
I am not Jesus. I won’t always know what Jesus would do; but I can ask Him to be in whatever I end up doing. I can guarantee that my heart will still stutter, I can guarantee that my mouth will stutter even more. But maybe those prostitutes in Saipan weren’t interested in my eloquence or my heart’s stability. I think they just needed me to look into their eyes and feel. Feel everything that they couldn’t understand; and let them know that it hurt me too. Sometimes the walk to freedom begins in someone else’s eyes and someone else’s heart; the knowledge that you can get where they are going. We are all in slavery, and we all need help. We are surrounded by slaves every day, passing them on our way to class, or in the lines at Starbucks. We all need each other, and your problems are always worth my time. I need to be able to look in your eyes and know that what you have conquered, I can conquer too; what I have conquered, you can conquer too. Simply the knowledge that you can be free, releases a kind of freedom into my life.
Someday I’m going back to Saipan, back to the Garapan Strip. I won’t jog past this time, and I won’t regret what I do. I may stutter and I may look stupid, but I’ll do what I should have done a year ago. I’m going to let them know that there’s love. Real love. And I’ve found it, so they can find it too.
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