Looking for Home

The boy, barely 13, huddles in the night, backpack and bedroll behind, sign in front, looking for anything - cash, a job, shelter, a friendly face. I reach in my pocket for a bill I've placed there for just such an encounter.

I'm outside Portland's Lloyd Center, mega-crossroads and site of far too many pre-teen girl entrapments by cunning pimps. This boy, he's no safer. Though fewer boys are trafficked for sex, there are plenty other forms of bondage laying in waiting.

Any kid sitting out on this night in this cold with a little bit of gear is not doing this for fun. It's no Boy Scout outing, this. Why does he sit there huddled against the pillars out of the rain and not in some nice, warm home surrounded by loving parents and siblings? Kids don't just up and run away from secure love. They tell me there are 1,500 street kids in this modern, prosperous city. Countless more are stuck in hellholes of "homes" wishing they could be anywhere but.

These most vulnerable among us have a snowball's chance in Tucson of making it to a prosperous and healthy old age, captured for posterity in one of those multigenerational family photos. The odds are extremely high their lives will be hell-filled with selling their own or others' bodies, selling drugs, numbing the pain with drugs or drink, living day-by-day on crime and the halfwits of their minds left over from all this abuse. Having escaped one hell, they will enter another. They've been lied to, beaten up by, cheated on by, and kicked out by all sorts of big people from parents to pimps to pushers to preachers to politicians. And they know they can trust only Number One.

We, who will sit in our comfortable homes and watch remakings of Dicken's tales this Christmas, are tempted to think such a dismal underworld is a thing of the distant past. But the ghost of Christmas Present comes to show us that countless little Oliver Twists and Orphan Annies remain among us -- only for them there are no Daddy Warbucks or Roses or Mr. Browlows to save them.

Or are there? A growing chorus of carolers rehearses, bent on doing something concrete to rescue, better yet preserve, these kids. Some work the nights serving them on the streets. Others plot complicated rescues of sex trafficking victims. Still others plod on bravely to heal broken families, provide foster and respite and rescue homes, and find ways to break the multigenerational cycles of poverty and abuse that feed these ravenous streets.

Education and advocacy of our citizens and public servants to stir them all to action are key. This past Monday the Oregon Center for Christian Values, dedicated to just such education and advocacy, invited me to join its board. I felt as if I had found "home" wrestling tough matters of systemic suffering and public policy with them. As co-chair of OCCV's Human Trafficking Advisory Committee the past few months, I've been helping a small team forge a plan of action, complete with well-crafted statement viewing the HT nightmare through the lens of biblical justice. No one I've met is FOR human trafficking, but it will take more than mere intentions to end it.

Last week, Stephanie Ahn Mathis, OCCV's Executive Director, was invited to an important press conference. Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon's senior U.S. Senator, announced plans to introduce a bill authorizing federal funds to set up rescue shelters for sex trafficking victims. Local organizations, raising funds for just such a shelter in our city, have been hampered by a dismally weak economy and high unemployment. Federal funds are woefully short as well. But we sell these kids over and over again whenever we refuse to act. And so Stephanie represented OCCV at that press conference because we believe that the time to act is now, not after some future recovery.

Meanwhile that boy huddles somewhere in our city tonight waiting for more than a handout. No kid picks that life as the life of choice. Sin has gotten him to that place - sins of family, of society, of those who do nothing. Repentance is in order, a repentance that includes serious changes in the agendas of this state's Communities of Faith and of "we the people" ourselves.