Dear Friends,
This is the 6th year I've taught at Lakeview Bible College and Seminary (formerly Madras College of Evangelism). Each time I've come, I've spent time teaching students who are in their final year of their BTh degree (Bachelors of Theology). The students come from all over India and Burma and have been trained intensively in the Scriptures. My role is to expose them to the character of God in terms of how He relates and responds to the poor-and in turn, how the church must relate and respond to the poor.
The setting is an isolated campus an hour away from Chennai, India. The school is named after a large lake that wraps around the fringes of the property. Tonight a huge rusty-orange moon reflects its face off the surface of the lake. The sky somehow seems bigger out here. The moon seems bigger too and the light radiated by it illuminates the wave-like ripples in the clouds that cradle it.
The years teaching here have been rewarding. Each I facilitate is an opportunity for me to size up my past 12 months of learning and experiences, allowing for a means of measuring my own personal growth in understanding poverty and the poor. This year is no exception.
But this year I am struggling to understand my most recent exposure to poverty and my most recent experiences with the poor.
It was less than a week ago that Phileena and I were in Bangkok, Thailand visiting the WMF field staff working in that city.
Tonight Bangkok seems farther away than the 3-hour flight that brought me to India. The peacefulness of the Indian countryside and the gentle breeze this evening make this night seem more like a spring evening in Kentucky or Tennessee. The moon reflecting its golden color off the glassy lake here is as far away from the crowded, dirty streets of Bangkok that my feet tread just 4 nights ago.
Last week, the setting I found myself in was completely different. I wasn't surrounded by committed and faithful students of the Scriptures, but young women and girls selling their bodies to tourists. In a recent local newspaper article here in India, a reporter writing about the commercial sex industry in the region stated, “When it comes to chaining women to their flesh, society molds its own shackles. If not with force, pressure, terror and poverty, it casts the chains in tradition. It tells women they were born for their flesh, and not worth otherwise.”
It's speculated that as many as 2 million of Thailand's 60 million people are involved in prostitution with as many as 800,000 children. Patpong, one of the most notorious red-light districts in Bangkok, is an alleyway of contradictions. On this short stretch of road (probably ¼ of a mile or less) there are more than 100 strip clubs, go-go bars, massage parlors and brothels lining both sides of the street.
During the day Patpong is deserted. If it weren't for the lewd signs displaying the names of the clubs and bars (many of the names so vulgar and crude that the mere mention of them would be shameful) you'd never realize where you are.
At night it's another story. What is a quiet and unassuming street by day at night becomes a carnival of perversion with lights, blaring music, and half-naked women parading its streets. Menus with the unspeakably lewd sexual services offered by the women in these bars and clubs are thrust in your face as you try to navigate your way down the crowded and narrow walkways. It's not uncommon to bump into a wide-eyed tourist who's peaking inside the open door of one of the bars where barely clothed, if even clothed at all, women dance on table tops and stages. Western men parade the streets hand in hand with a Thai girl half their age and often half their size.
The contrast between Patpong during the night and day is astonishing. The empty streets and seemingly deserted bars are a reflection of the empty hearts that fill them in the evenings. Only an empty heart would try that hard to fill itself with something so hurtful, so perverted, and so horrifying.
A couple 7-11 convenient stores are ironically located at each end of Patpong. The 7-11 stores at both ends of Patpong seem so out of place when seen located next to a brothel, until you realize that Patpong is the eventual extrapolation of a consumer-driven society taken to its logical extreme. At the first 7-11 I went inside to buy a 19 Bhat (approximately $0.45) strawberry slurpee. Later that night, right next to that same 7-11, you can buy just about whatever you want from a child forced to prostitute for 19 Bhat. Strip mall takes on a whole new meaning when it strips us of our morality so that 19 Bhat can strip a child of her self-worth.
All around Patpong is one of Bangkok's busiest and most lucrative business districts. Tall, air-conditioned buildings filled with malls that celebrate premier fashion designers from Milan, Paris, and New York, simultaneously shadow the seediest, dirties prisons of sexual slavery where women and children from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand are subjugated and enslaved. A fashion driven mentality drives one to be clothed in only the swankiest and the best, while leading the other to have her clothes forcibly removed against her will.
In Daphne Eck's (WMF Advocacy Coordinator and Editor of The Cry) recent article Not For Sale, she reflects on her visit to Patpong. Her insight is pointed and so I quote at length:
“I had been prepared to see brothels, so the blatant prostitution saddened me but did not surprise me. What did astound my senses was the outdoor market in the midst of it all. Every kind of clothing, wooden and metal crafts, jewelry and pieces of art had been displayed in great quantity on rows of temporary stalls set up in the middle of the street. Tourists milled through the stalls leisurely, buying souvenirs to take back home. However, if a trinket shopper turned around and took four steps behind him, he would find himself inside a brothel. The touristy market atmosphere seemed absurd to me, but was also a reality check. The blitheness in which the goods were presented reminded me that in this place, the bodies of women and girls were indeed only another commodity to be traded.
As I witnessed Patpong's obvious and gross devaluation of humanity during my short walking tour, I was reminded of the passage in Revelation 18:10-13:
'Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power…The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys her cargoes anymore – cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; fine linen, purple silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense and myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies of souls of men.'
Patpong, thriving with Western late night shoppers of every imaginable type of good, struck me as a modern day Babylon. In its curse of the rich merchant city of Babylon, Scripture shows us what the city perceived to be its most valuable goods; its most valued goods are listed first, and its least valued, last. Babylonians placed the highest value on gold, silver, and precious stones, while cloth, wood, bronze, and incense was of lesser value. Spices, incense, food and animals were valued lesser still. Tacked on to the end of the long list of cargo, almost as an afterthought, is the least valued commodity sold and traded in Babylon-the bodies and souls of men. We see the same economy of the kingdom of man at work in today's world, where sex is shamelessly bought and sold and modern day slavery is a harsh reality. Evidenced by the millions of child laborers and sex workers, the world says that humanity and especially children have no inherent value-save the dollar to be provided a pimp, loan shark, sweatshop or corporate stock
holder.
Though sinful humanity may assign little or no inherent value to the bodies and souls of men, God remains convinced that humanity is of the highest value, worth even the blood sacrifice of his Son. He turns the world's economy upside-down, and ascribes the least value to the world's most valued treasures. In God's heavenly Kingdom, it is promised that we will walk on streets of 'pure gold, like transparent glass' (Rev. 21:21). Though of the highest value in Babylon, gold is as dust and packed down gravel to God. In His eyes, gold is only worth enough to be trampled under dirty feet, a part of the body that only the lowest servant would touch in ancient Middle-Eastern cultures.”
The marketplace of Patpong never seemed so empty. During the day the brothels and shops are as hollow as the hearts that fill them at night. Materialism consumes the consumer to the point that the bodies and souls of men and women are the commodities ascribed the least possible value. Crowded and bustling with activity, yet full of hollow hearts and empty souls feeding the cruel dragon of consumerism. Such tragic irony that our idolatry to materialism leads to such degradation and perversion. Never has it been so apparent as it was on the street of Patpong, from one commodity to the next, one transaction to the next.
I'm reminded of my short visit to Bangkok now that I'm back in India. It's gotten later, the moon has turned from orange to its usual yellowy-white. The stars peaking through the moonlit Indian sky seem to be winking at me. The chirping of the crickets punctuate the stillness with a soothing song of evening. It's so quiet out here, so peaceful.
Though I find myself alone, I know I am not. Over the past 4 days my context has changed dramatically, but the world in which I find myself remains the same. The cool breeze this evening makes the sultry, music-filled streets of Patpong seem so far away. But it's closer than I think. The setting has changed, the context is different, but the world is the same and I am a part of it.
Where is the place for the church on such a street? What is Christ's alternative that could compel an empty heart and an empty brothel to surrender?
Tonight my heart wonders at how God relates to the men and women of Patpong, how He responds to their suffering and sin, and how He calls us to respond. Our context may be different, but it's the same world-our world, and we're responsible. The bridges have been built. Our materialism and consumerism, taken to it's extreme, is felt inside the broken and used bodies of women and children all around the world. May we not contribute to the suffering that is, but become part of the solution of bringing God's grace and healing to those who need it the most. During the day the brothels of Patpong may be empty, but at night His love calls out to the empty hearts of those who fill them. May we help answer that call and allow His love to be spread.
Surrendered and Broken,
Chris Heuertz