Put Your Actions Where Your Faith Is: Tales from Thailand #2

I am continuing in my blogs today about my Thailand experience.  I would like to share a little bit with you about a little girl with whom I deeply connected and her possible future if Christians don't put their actions where their faith is.

From Monday through Friday, our team partnered with Agape Home, an orphanage for children living with HIV/AIDS.  We divided into three teams: medical, dental, and sports/Bible camp.  I worked on the medical team with our pediatrician, providing physicals and eye exams to the wonderful children at Agape Home.  I also traveled with our pediatrician and nurse to foster homes in the area, providing them with the same services we offered at the orphanage. 

While working at the Agape Home, I especially bonded with one little girl named Pinpana.  Pinpana is 3 ½ years old and suffers from AIDS, respiratory complications, and anxiety.  Of all the children at the orphanage, Pin seemed naturally drawn to me and I to her.  My heart swelled with love and compassion for her.  I spent my downtime at the orphanage playing with her favorite toy (a fire truck, nonetheless), teaching her how to take pictures with my camera, and going for little walks.  Because of her parental abandonment, Pin suffers from attachment disorder and therefore forms attachments very quickly with those who offer her love and attention.  While I do believe I bonded with her in a unique way, I am not naïve and recognize that attachment disorder certainly affects Pin’s judgments and affections.  This is why she and the other children at Agape Home need to live in stable homes with godly, loving families.  I hope to one day provide her with such an environment.

While in Thailand, I learned that sex trafficking is its top industry.  Young women (and men) are trafficked and forced, coerced, or defrauded into prostitution.  Though illegal, corrupt police officers receive bribes and even facilitate the trafficking process.  Karaoke bars seemed to serve as the “cover” for brothels, where for twelve hours a night young women from elementary school age to early twenties are made available for rape, abuse, and molestation.  Orphans who do not experience a stable home environment under the watchful eye of consistent parents are particularly vulnerable to trafficking due to their severe attachment disorder.  They respond to even manipulative and perverted affection; once released from orphanages as young adults, these broken individuals are typically trafficked within two days.  They end up in a scene similar to the adjacent photograph, lined up outside a bar as objects for sinful pleasure

Take a look at Pinpana’s picture.  Her face is filled with the bright hope of youthful innocence, a young and intelligent little girl who truly deserves the best.  And due to advances in medical science, there is a great chance that Pinpana will develop into a healthy adult.  However, without the

intervention of Christians adopting orphans, supporting missionaries and outreach organizations, educating their friends, family members, and churches, and praying against the evil ongoing in Thailand, little girls like Pinpana are trafficked by their twenty-first birthday.

The Apostle James writes, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27).  The Psalms are laden with commands to provide justice and care for the fatherless (orphans) and widows (Psalm 10:14, 10:18, 27:10, 68:5, 82:3, 146:9 to name a few references in the Psalms alone).  In the Old Testament Law, God's command is frighteningly blunt: "You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.  If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless" (Exodus 22:22-24).  God's heart for orphans (and widows) burns intensely with compassion, love, and justice.

The problem for many American Christians is that we think these verses and commands do not apply to us.  While we may not be involved in caring for orphans or widows, most of us do not intentionally oppress them.  Orphans simply do not cross our paths.  Someone must be looking after the orphans somewhere, after all.  And because orphans are out of sight and out of mind, tucked away in some third world country and seen only on overly emotional and cheesy infomercials, we can press onward with relative certainty that we have not disobeyed God's command to care for the fatherless because we have not directly oppressed them even if we have not directly assisted them.

Image taken from joymag.co.za

We've deceived ourselves.  The Scriptures teach us to love not only in word, but in deed (1 John 3:18), to not only be hearers of the Word but doers (James 1:23-25), and that faith without works is dead (James 2:14-18).  Do we realize that crises of the world (such as the AIDS orphans in Thailand) stand as witnesses against the Church?  If the Church (the organism, not the institution) were put on trial and Satan were the prosecutor, he could call orphans, widows, the impoverished, the oppressed, the trafficked, those persecuted and slain, single mothers, the ill and many others to the witness stand and say: "Why do you exist in the world today?  And what did the Church do for you?"  And then he would call all those who have answered the pleas for help: government organizations, secular non-profits, the Red Cross/Red Crescent, military forces, Peace Corps. volunteers, fire departments and emergency services agencies, FEMA, the Mormons, and many others and say, "Hey, when you were responding to the call for help, what was the American Church doing?  Based upon their actions and attitudes, would you say that the American Church is needed or relevant?"  And while we may object for asking leading questions, the point would be made.  I thank God that in Jesus we have an advocate and we have forgiveness of sins, but do you realize that Christ's own words can be used against us?  "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me" (Matthew 25:45).

Listen, I've been told I'm too critical of the Church.  I've been told that the Church is Christ's bride and I need to maintain an attitude of respect and love.  And people are right.  I'm critical.  And I'm working on being less judgmental of others and I ask for your prayers in that regard. There are those who have answered the call of discipleship and obedience; for those who I have, I am thankful and inspired by you.  However, I cannot love and respect the Church without speaking to it honestly.  I look at the prophets of the Old Testament and I see that they loved the Church, but they did not speak with hesitance or reservation.  If there is a message to proclaim and a truth to be told, it must be done.  Though the voice I have may be small, I will raise it loudly to advocate on behalf of those who have no advocate in hopes that my American Christian friends would do the same.  

This is what I ask: please ask the Lord what role He has for you to play on behalf of the oppressed, the fatherless (orphans), widows, and others in need of justice.  We are all part of the Church's body and the body has many different parts, so we are all called to serve differently.  Yet, please do not use the truth that we all have different roles to play as an excuse to declare your comfort zone as your role.  The brain tells the body parts what to do, the body parts do not tell the brain.  And if Jesus Christ is the "brain" of this religious body, do not tell Him what you will do.  Ask Him your role and obey.  Anything short of such surrender is not genuine discipleship and is therefore disobedience.  May God help us all as we endeavor to serve the Pinpanas of the world and to live incarnationally in our communities.