Dear Friends, Family, and Prayer Partners,
I have written and rewritten this letter at least a hundred times (maybe six), so I am just going to write something, send it, and see what happens.
I started with a very long “summary” of this year which was incredibly annoying to write and even more annoying to read, so what I think is going to happen is that I will touch on a few things that have happened this year, you are welcome to respond, and we can start an individual conversation. What I really wish I could do is take all of you out for coffee and force you to listen to me whine about how confusing God and the world are, but since that can’t happen, individual correspondence is the next best thing.
Azkaban and Gotham City are the two analogies I tend to shift between to describe Manila. I have also tried out Dante’s Ante-Inferno on my really bad days, but that didn’t go over as well, so Gotham and Azkaban it is.
In all fairness, Manila only became so bleak because the West took a beautiful culture and tried to make it America when it should have been allowed to evolve from its own history and not ours. Good going, us.
The city also speaks nothing about the people living in it. I have never experienced such warmth, love, and understanding anywhere else on the planet. Where there is dirt or a puddle of water with a suspicious green glow, it is counteracted with smiles, hugs, and all the food you could ever need. There are no greater people than those in the Philippines.
But when I do imply that Manila is a soul-sucking crime hole, I mean it in a very loving way, as Manila and I function within a love-hate relationship. This, a lot of the time, is hilarious for everyone except me. People get to watch me have small freak-outs every time I have to get in a crowded elevator. Anyone who gets to watch me yell at a cab driver for trying to charge me extra because he “took me further” because he got LOST is most certainly amused, and the poor 18 year-old grocery store kid who caught me in the feminine hygiene section on my way to the dog food section who stopped me to inquire about my “flow” was hopefully amused and not at all frightened when I put my hands over my ears and ran away going, “What is reality!?!?!”
(I have SO many stories.)
It is hard to talk about the hard things. I’d much rather write you a long update with a bunch of funny, semi-sad stories and never touch on human trafficking, poverty, humanity, and Church with a capital C, but since those are all of the reasons I came here, I will address them.
Justice is much more complicated than any of us could imagine.
It doesn’t seem like it should be complicated. I mean, what’s good is good, and what’s bad is bad, and what is bad should go to prison. That’s how we tend to think of right vs. wrong.
But right and wrong begin to blend when our “trafficking victims,” young girls and boys, are selling their bodies voluntarily so that they can make money to feed their brothers and sisters.
Right and wrong blend when the woman too old to be considered attractive enough to sell her body, manages the girls who do, and she appears to love and keep these girls safe while they “meet” with clients. She will go to jail for life. For being poor.
Right and wrong blend when some of the men who is pimping the “trafficking victims,” again, is too old to sell himself, but makes sure the girls he manages are fed, get the medicine they need, and he makes sure they are always safe. He will go to jail for life. For being poor. (He is also the man the girls beg to see after they are removed from the bar. They want to know if he is safe.)
Right and wrong blend when law enforcement agencies are overheard making disgusting and demeaning sex jokes in front of the girls, and you begin to learn that the “good guys” are actually some of the worst people you have ever met. They should go to jail for life. ...Which I have maybe told them to their faces.
And right and wrong are lost when some of the most dangerous bars that desperately need our help will never be touched because they are owned by the police.
And even if right and wrong, justice and injustice were clear, that would hardly make a difference when what is perpetuating all unjust acts is a much larger problem than human trafficking: Poverty.
As long as poverty exists, girls will be for sale. Money and lust keep the world turning since the world seems to have run out of grace and mercy.
I have come to believe that many the people we put in jail should not have necessarily gone to jail, and every time we get a “life in prison” verdict, my stomach immediately bunches into knots because the children of that man or woman who we just sent to prison are now going to be forced to sell themselves.
About five months in, I started to believe that my good intentions/desires to help people are actually perpetuating both poverty and violence. And coming to this realization and witnessing it firsthand leads to some important but uncomfortable thinking about injustice, but also about God.
I have watched a lot of people, scattered all over the world, leave the Church this year, claim God to be implausible, and suggest that God is something humans turn to in order to comfort themselves and justify a lack of understanding.
What scares me more than watching people leave is my being able to see the truth behind every point that was made about why God could not exist and agreeing with it.
So life shifted from my not understanding right and wrong to not understanding the God of the universe. Not that I understood him before, but I became painfully aware of my lack of understanding.
So, at the very end of November, after trying to work through all kinds of terrible things that had happened while I was here, topped off with my grandfather dying while I was unreachable in Malaysia, and watching the two people holding me together fly back to the US, I became a shell of a person. That sounds really dramatic, but I’m not overly dramatic, so it must be true.
I maybe didn’t leave my bed for a full two weeks (except to eat and such), but when one is having to wrestle with God or no God, “justice” perpetuating injustice, good actually being bad, and even the less painful thoughts of, “Maybe my theology is just being correctly adjusted. Wait. Then what have I been believing my whole life!?” are still exhausting, and getting up to eat is maybe more of a challenge than it should be. I wasn’t depressed, I don’t think, and I wasn’t even really sad. I was just confused and disillusioned. I now understand that that is an okay thing.
Eventually I had to get up to leave for Bali (I know. Woe is me, right?) where I was with a couple of people I could be completely honest with, and sarcastic with, and who were going through the same thinking as I was. As I sat (having very illegally climbed over a fence to sit on a very tall cliff overlooking the ocean) and witnessed the most amazing sunset that I have ever seen, my legs wrapped in a saree, while hanging out with a bunch of monkeys at a Hindu temple, I fought with myself about the science behind a sunset. But that science couldn’t account for what went through my heart as I saw it. (That seriously annoyed me because I don’t like “feelings” things.) My phone had mysteriously died, as had the phones of the two people I was with, so we couldn’t get the sunset on camera, but I loved that. The sunset was just for us. And the monkeys.
We were caught in a downpour as we walked back from the temple, so I hopped on the back of a strange man’s moped, and held my arms out the entire way home, being pelted by heavy, Bali rain, because I had managed to stop being a shell and exist as a person again. A confused person, but a person.
The best conversation I have ever had about Jesus came the next day when this Hindu man and I both realized that we worship Jesus. Jesus is one of the many gods in the Hindu religion (and it is indeed the same Jesus as Christians worship), but this man was ecstatic about Jesus and how good he is, and how powerful he is. I have never seen anyone get that excited about Jesus, and the last place I expected to see that excitement was from a man who was explaining to me how to prepare an offering to keep the bad spirits out of my home.
My very comfortable theology on hell was turned upside down in that moment.
This sent me into a whole new existential crisis that I will not waste your time explaining, but will happily discuss if you decide you have questions.
Props to you if you’re still reading! This is already longer than I intended it to be.
So then in February, I did a visa run to Cambodia, a very Buddhist nation. Some of my friends and I were walking through this temple that took decades to build and even longer to decorate. My friend whispered, and I don’t think she meant any of us to hear it, “Wow. They must love their god so much more than I love mine.” Something like this had also been said about the Hindu temples of Bali. This really got my brain turning, and also my stomach, as I tried to learn from Buddhism how to better love my God and show him that love in something that takes hundreds of years to make. To love him in something I may never see finished.
Coming back from Cambodia, my journal entires and prayers all started with, “Dear God. You, know. If you’re actually there...” or “Dear God, I know you don’t exist, but...” which is all pretty funny now because starting a discussion with someone in order to tell them that they don’t exist is a whole new level of ironic.
Jesus was probably also pretty annoyed, so he gave me Rachel Held Evans, who gave me the permission I apparently needed to ask questions. So I started asking questions like, “Can there be a hell, or is it a metaphor?” “If much of the old testament is metaphorical, then has God ever interacted with man apart from Christ?” “What would that mean?” “If the creation story is metaphorical, then how did sin enter the world?” “How can prayer work within free will?” ...and all kinds of other questions that probably make my mother extremely uncomfortable.
And now is probably a good time to interject that the coolest lessons I have learned about Jesus this year came from Hinduism, Buddhism, and atheism.
I had already had many major “tipping points” but the tipping point of all tipping points was this month. I came back to my apartment after having met up with an eight year-old client who was raped and may continue to be raped by a government official who will never have to face jail time because of his high position, and the internet had exploded. After finally allowing myself to think about Jesus as a reality, the Church decided to make that difficult to justify. It would appear that the world as we know it had ended because many many months ago, World Vision decided to employ married gay Christians, someone at Christianity Today got ahold of this information, published it, and as a result, a very embarrassing and disappointing discourse began.
This is when I tried to disassociate myself from the big-C Church, but I failed miserably.
The harder I try to run, the closer the Church pulls me to herself, and I have decided that the God who allows me to ask very big questions would probably be okay with my diving head first into a mess (this seems to be a thing for me) and ask new questions.
My friends and I started writing back-and-forth, and we all realized that we were all being hurt by the Church’s actions, and the Church was inadvertently removing us from herself by calling us Millennials and dismissing anything we have to say despite our being, unavoidably, the next generation of Church leadership.
We realized that our thoughts were starting to take the shape of a book, and that somehow became, “Whitney, could you make this a book?” And so, against my better judgement, this will be the next really messy and uncomfortable project I willingly insert myself into. But for a Church I love so so much (but totally against my will), I’m willing to let things get a little messy.
So that’s where I am right now, and because of all of my chaotic thought processes, that is why I haven’t sent an update in a very long time.
I have just under two months left in the Philippines, and I have no idea what will come next, but I know it will have to do with human trafficking. I have applied for a position with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as a staff analyst to help analyze video content to find missing children. That is a very fancy way to say that I have to watch porn to help find abused kids. My thinking is that if this job is done well now, maybe it won’t have to be a job anymore. I could use prayers for this. I know it sounds terrible, but this is exactly the kind of work I am looking to do.
My plan right now is to move to Denver and study forensic psychology to better equip myself for a position like the one I just described. Denver has one of two human trafficking research centers, and I would like to be able to learn more about what trafficking looks like in America from a well-established research facility.
Other than that, my immediate plans are to sleep for a month, watch Netflix, eat salads, and try to stop assuming that every white man I see is trying to buy sex. I can honestly say that I have never been more tired than I am at this moment. Spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally...you name it, I’m exhausted in it.
In this final update, I am going to ask three things of you:
- If you are financially able to do so, please sponsor a child through World Vision. Ten thousand children were dropped in this last month, and children, like the eight year-old client I know, need your money to prevent abuse. The $30 a month goes to schooling, and education is HUGE in the battle against human trafficking. I know that many people who dropped their sponsorship felt morally obligated to do so, but what really happened is that 10,000 children’s probability of being trafficking has increased exponentially. IJM works with World Vision, and they are a top notch group that I very much respect.
- Pray for the Church as “social justice” has become a huge buzzword, and we have all decided that we need to help. One of the many things I have learned about fighting for justice this year is that it is VERY DANGEROUS to try to help a cause that you do not fully understand. Diving into a justice issue without knowing much about it is much more likely to cause harm than good.
- I’d like to say that I don’t need prayers, but, oh man, I totally need prayer. I have developed this ability to sleep at least 18 hours a day and still be able to go to bed on time and immediately fall asleep. I think this is probably considered burn-out, but I have to keep going until June 14. Reverse cultural shifting is also a process for which I could use prayer. I’m guessing this won’t be too hard, but answering, “How was the Philippines!?” most certainly will be. Lastly, I have a lot of things that I am processing and that I will have to continue to process once I’m home. I’ve got a lot of growing up to do yet and could use prayers for that =)
So to sum this up quickly, I am walking away from this year very uncomfortably and with more questions than answer. But, and I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true, I really see this as growth.
Thanks for reading this novel. I didn’t mean for it to be five pages long, but accidents happen. I just touched on things, so if you want to dig deeper into something, ask! I know an unfortunate number of things about human trafficking, but I know that information can be helpful to people wanting to better understand it. I also know that the stories I have can be a little too much for people and don’t want to subject everyone to those stories.
Thank you for your prayers, and your love, and your financial support through this messy year.
My very confusing and imperfect love to each of you,
Whitney
