Interview with Covered - Acts 16:16 - 22

Hi family. Hi.

Get you all set up here. You guys are like, "Who is she?" You're going to know in just a minute and you're going to be really proud to know her. Before we get started this morning, I want to forewarn you that today's service is PG13. So if you're like, "Man, I have kids. I'm worried about what they might hear." I just want to let you know, we have an awesome Children's Ministry that they can go be a part of for today's service, if you want to do that. You're welcome to keep them, but understand that the content that we're going to be talking about this morning is a little more adult in nature. So we want to be honest about this.

We're in Acts 16, and by the way I got to say this before I move on. There is a group of people in Pablo Montana that watches our sermons. You guys are like, "I've never heard of Pablo Montana. No one has, not very big town. But to those people, I just want to say this, thank you for what you did to honor my dad. Thank you for what you did.

So we're going to jump into this, Acts 16 is what we're going to tackle today. This passage, there's a lot to talk about in the passage, but as I started to prepare and the Lord kind of wouldn't let me get away from a very specific piece of it. And the more that I dug into it, the more I was like, "I could wax eloquent about this thing, or I could have someone talk about it that actually does this for a living and actually understands the ins and outs of this." And so I'm going to read the passage, work through it very, very briefly. And then I'm going to interview Joanna who works with a ministry called Covered and Covered deals with helping survivors of human trafficking get back on their feet.

If you ever thought, "Gosh, the Bible doesn't have anything to say about real life." It's just full of ... It's the most relevant book, probably more relevant now than ever. And so this is one of those spaces where I just want to have an honest, modern conversation about what's happening in this passage. And so we won't tackle the passage so much as just an understanding of kind of what happens around us, and so this will all make sense as we get into it.

So I'm going to read the passage starting in verse 16. Here's what it says. "As we were going to a place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling." So this girl is a slave and she's being used to make money for her owners. Does this sound like human trafficking yet? Yeah. "She followed Paul and us, crying out, 'These men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you the way of salvation and this, she kept doing for many days, Paul having become greatly annoyed." I just want to stop right there and go, it's okay to be a spiritual leader and be mad sometimes. It gives me comfort. "Turned and said to the spirit, 'I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.' And it came out of her that very hour."

Now here's the thing. What Paul does is supposed to bring her freedom and peace and joy and hope and fulfillment and all those things, right? That's what it's supposed to bring, but here's what happened. "But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged him in the marketplace before the rulers." So they abandoned her and they tried to punish Paul and Silas. So once she's used up, once she's no good to them, they didn't care about her. They were using her. "Paul and Silas, dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, 'These men are Jews and they're disturbing our city." Which is not true. They're not disturbing the whole city. They just disturbed these guys' financial racket.

"They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice." Now, what they mean there is just quickly. Christianity was illegal as it was considered atheism in the Roman World. It's all about worshiping God, but it was only about worshiping one God. You weren't allowed to worship the rest of the Pantheon, so it was illegal on the basis of atheism. "The crowd joined in attacking them and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them in the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks."

Now this there's so much cool stuff here and I so wanted to do a sermon on the inner prison and all that, and have really cool pictures and we could use the Jumbotron and whatever. We call this Chris, Big Chris. There's a story. But I wanted to use all these really cool pictures and stuff to illustrate, but the more that I prepared on it, the more that I couldn't get away from this little girl, who was being controlled and manipulated for somebody else's profit. And then all of a sudden, once she couldn't do that anymore, they just bailed out on her altogether. And that sounds an awful lot like what Joanna deals with every day.

So, Covered is one of our ministries that we partner with, to help deal with this issue of human trafficking. And I know that for me, when I think about human trafficking, I'm like, "That's a world away from me." And so I don't really understand it. I mean, I know that happens somewhere out there, but that doesn't happen close to me. And I think what you're going to find is you're going to be shocked by some of the things that we talk about today. And so we're going to do that, but before we tackle that, Joanna, I just want to ask you to put a definition on it. What constitutes trafficking?

Yeah. So we will typically say that there's a trafficking triangle. So there's three elements that have to be in place. And that, you have to have the trafficker, you have to have the buyer and you have to have the victim. And then on top of that, there's the Victim's Protection Act of 2000, which is trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or if the person forced to do the act is under the age of 18. So if we start with that piece of it and just talk about that last piece, under the age of 18, if it has those three, remember the trafficking triangle, if it has those three elements, it will always be trafficking. There is no such thing as a child prostitute. You'll hear things in the news and they'll say things like underage prostitute. Well, that doesn't exist. There is no such thing as a child prostitute. So that will always be trafficking.

Then on top of that, you get to those three words, the force, fraud or coercion. And so I'm just going to kind of define each of those just a little bit. Force could be exactly what it sounds like. It could be force as in violence. It could also be a force drugging. We have had a lot of people that has been their experience.

Fraud, it could be the person is ... I just like to share an illustration of a woman that I actually sat in the courtroom and watched this court play out. But this woman was driving around in her minivan with her two kids in the back, and she would target homeless kids and say to them, "Hey, you need a family. You shouldn't be out here. I'll be your mom. You come home with me." And for two weeks she would take care of them. She would clothe them. She would feed them. And then in about two weeks after that, or a couple days after that, she would just snap and it would be, they owed her, they would have to pay her back and this was how they were going to do it. So with fraud, they will make them believe that they owe them back when they really don't.

Then we've got coercion. And coercion, I think the easiest way to explain that one is, we worked with a survivor who said they would send me all around the country. They knew I'd always come back, because they had my two year old. So that's coercion. I've been working with a survivor over the past four years, who is currently in trafficking and she won't leave because she said, "This is the only way to keep my grandparents safe, because they know where my grandparents live and they'll kill my grandparents if I leave." So that's coercion. So that kind of gives you the definition. We're just going to kind of skim the top of it, but that kind of gives you the definition of it.

Okay. So, just because I'm totally ignorant on this, you said it's not child ... There's no such thing as a child prostitute.

Right.

What's the difference between child prostitute and trafficking?

Well, it will always be trafficking, because we live in a society that says that children cannot choose that.

Okay.

And so, it will always be trafficking. If those three elements are in play, it will always be trafficking.

So the prostitute side of things would be, they chose it. For better or for worse, they chose it.

Well, no. Yeah, it's confusing because you would see a person and they will even say. Sometimes they will even say they chose it, right? A lot of times we work with victims that we have to kind of define it for them and help them understand. This is trafficking. This is not prostitution, and this is why. Here's the thing. If you have options, then you can make a choice, right? If you don't have options, then there really isn't a choice there. So a lot of times what will happen is people will ... They will be in trafficking. Maybe they've been trafficked, we've heard this a lot. Somebody's been trafficked by their trafficker for six years. They started trafficking them when they were 14 years old, okay. And they were able to get away from that. They were able to end that.

Then what will happen is, they will get out of that. And because there's very few resources for people that are over the age of 18, what will happen is they'll end up back on the street, okay. Now the first thing the trafficker is going to do is, he's going to take away their license or ID. He's going to take away their Social Security Card. He's going to take away birth certificates of them or their children. Anything that identifies them, because traffickers are going to build in layers to keep people, okay. So he's going to take away all of that. So if you have had all that taken away and you end up out on the street, you can't get a job because you don't have a Social Security Card. You can't even get a hotel because you don't have an ID. You're highly traumatized. You're probably dealing with an addiction. You may have your child with you. The survival's going to kick in and you're going to figure out real quick, how to make some money, how to take care of your child, how to feed yourself.

So quite often what will happen is, survivors will end up backing on the street. They will end up back in prostitution, but there's this illusion that pimps will keep them safe. So then, they will end up connecting with a pimp again, and they'll end up back under pimp control and eventually back into trafficking. And that cycle just continues until somebody steps in with some resources and said, "Hey, do you want out? You want out of this?" And that's what we do. We ask people all the time, "You want out? We've got some resources. We could help you out."

Awesome. So like I said earlier, this is a whole separate world ... It feels like it's a world away.

Right.

And it's hard, I think for a lot of us who are like, "Hey, we're happy. We're Cleaver Family."

Right.

That's a deep cut. There was this show. It was black and white, Leave It To Beaver. For a lot of us, we're the happy little family. Okay, so how widespread is it, really? Does this hit close to home? Or is this just something we're making much ado about nothing?

No, this is very, very widespread. This is not just worldwide, this is nationwide. This is also here in the State of Colorado and it's here in Douglas County. People tell me all the time, they're like, "Oh, I'm so glad it's not here." And I'm like, "Oh friend, but it is." We just don't see it, because it's so secretive, right.

Yeah.

It flies under the radar. There's several reasons we don't see that, but one is, it's just so secretive. And so let me back up just a little bit and tell you about what the numbers are, just in Colorado. So there's an organization up north, Avery Center. They are fantastic and they get very accurate statistics. We don't usually share a lot of statistics because they're just really tricky. Sometimes they're not accurate and they change, and so we tend to not share a lot of those. But what we do share, we get from the Avery Center.

Avery Center is run by a survivor. And so this particular person can get more accurate data, because she's got an in. Survivors talk to survivors, right? And so she is able to talk with more people who are currently being trafficked. So her organization, they did a study on online ads and what they found was, they found, just in the State of Colorado, they found over 100,000 unique, separate advertisements, advertising somebody for prostitution. Now academic estimates are that people over the age of 18, 90% are actually being trafficked. So over 100,000 separate unique individual ads, 90% could be actually being trafficked.

So that tells you kind of the broader picture of the numbers. And the thing about that study too, is that study only focused on an escort style ad. It didn't focus on familial. That's when people sell their children or husband sells his wife. So it didn't include that. It didn't include street trafficking and it didn't include gang trafficking. So there's a lot of trafficking that missed. This is just a very specific type of trafficking, but that tells you the numbers in Colorado.

And to put even more boundaries on it, that's just online.

Just online.

And it's just over the age of 18.

Right, correct.

So nothing else.

Right. Yeah.

This is astounding to me, because that feels like it's a really narrow swath of the broader picture.

It absolutely is. And yet, you look at those numbers and you just ... Now here's the thing. We've heard other people say, "Oh well, this is what we think is happening in Colorado." When I heard her numbers, when her numbers came out, I said, "That is absolutely accurate." Because of the numbers we were seeing. We were turning away three people a week, because we just couldn't keep up with the numbers of the people that were coming our way. And so that will tell you what it is in Colorado. But here's where we've got to understand who the buyers are, okay, because this is going to help us understand a little more clearly as to where this is happening.

So this was a study that was done. The top buyer of underage females is going to be middle aged, married with children and they are going to make over $100,000 a year. Okay, so that gives you an idea of who those buyers are. Those buyers are in those affluent areas, right. And gone are the days that somebody has to drive down to Colfax or a bad part of town, a city motel to buy someone. Now they go online. They can order somebody and say, if they want a male or a female. They can say how old they want the person, what color they want the person, right? I mean, they can just basically order a person and that trafficker is going to bring that victim to the buyer.

So that's not happening in bad parts of town. I mean, it is happening in, it's still happening on Colfax. It's happening in those parts of town, but it's also happening in your part of town, in my part of town, because they're bringing the victim to the buyer.

So this happens in Parker. This happens in-

It absolutely happens.

The more wealthy-

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I know that too, because we're working with people who have been trafficked here. They've been trafficked in Douglas County.

Yeah. And I think that's important for us to recognize. This isn't a problem for over there. This is a problem for our own backyard. This is happening in our own backyard, and so we need to care about our community enough. We need to care about these individuals enough, but we need to care about our community enough to be willing to step into messy stuff. Do we know how bad it is in our area?

You know, we don't. I mean, that's tricky just because it's again, we don't have a lot of statistics and it's just so secretive. Yeah, but we've worked with quite a few people who have been trafficked in Douglas County. A lot of people, we will move out because they're not safe to stay here.

Sure.

And so we'll move them out. We'll move them out of town.

Sure. It seems to me like it's such a leap to get involved in this world. How do people get drawn in to trafficking? I think it's an important conversation, because I don't understand how people can get sucked into that world. And so how do people get drawn into trafficking?

Yeah. So first, I think we've got to look at a myth. There's a myth that people are taken. There's a movie called, Taken. A lot of used, or I used to believe that this is how it happened, was that people were just being snatched. I've talked with parents that are afraid that their kids are going to be snatched from the park, that they're going to be taken. Here's the thing. Only one to 2% are actually taken. That's it, and that's pretty accurate compared to what we've worked with. We've worked with 116 survivors since July 2017, and only one was taken and that was in another country. So that's pretty accurate.

So then we have to look at, okay, well then how is it happening? Well, you got to think about it through the eyes of a trafficker. It would be very easy for, or it's not easy for him to go and take somebody, right. That's dangerous for him. It's much easier to lure somebody.

Sure.

To lure somebody from a park, from a mall, to lure them from online. That's where we really find that it's happening a lot. So, I just want to share a story with you. I used to be a Youth Pastor here about five years ago and we were up at a winter camp, had about 15 girls in my cabin and we were trying to get ready to go to dinner, which is, if you've ever worked with teenage girls, that's pretty hard to wrangle them up and get them to ... Right? It's like, "Your hair looks fine. Oh my gosh. Put on your shoes." Just, you know. So I was doing all of that and one of them said, "Jo, you're getting ready to do something with trafficking. What does that mean?" So we started talking about it a little bit and I said, "Guys, here's the thing. It's so important for you guys to understand that people that you allow follow you on social media, or people that you strike up a chat with or something, really important that you actually understand who they are, because anybody can be anybody online."

One of the girls totally sold out her friend and she was like, "Yeah, like that creepy guy that follows you on Instagram." So I said, "Well, what creepy guy follows you on Instagram?" She's like, "Oh my gosh, it's not a big deal. I'm a part of the volleyball team." Now, let me pause for a minute because I just want you to know these were 15 girls that all went to school in Douglas County, little Church girls, right? This was who was in the room. And so she said, "Oh, it's not a big deal. I'm on the volleyball team. He tells us how beautiful we are and what stud volleyball players we are." And I said, "Well, can I see his profile? Show me his profile."

So she pulls out her phone and shows me his profile. And first thing I see is this very good looking man, young, probably about 20 years old. And the next thing I see makes my skin crawl, because it says, Romance Boudoir Photography. So of course, I have a red flag right. And I was like, "Girls, any red flags?" And no, they didn't, because they didn't know what boudoir meant. So I said, "Well, it's French for bedroom." And they're like, "Ew, gross." Yeah, it gets weirder. So right below that, it says, "Always looking for 13 to 17 year old girls."

Wow.

So I said, "Well ladies, bad news. I think you've got a child pornographer following you on Instagram. So we're going to block, we're going to report and then we're going to go to dinner." Because we're still trying to get to dinner, right? We're still trying to get that to happen.

Keep your eye on the prize.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

By the way, seven of the 15 girls had allowed this guy to follow them on social media.

Wow.

So one of the girls comes back after they've all left and she said, "I just feel really stupid." And I said, "Well honey, I didn't tell you all of this to make you feel stupid." And she said, "I just can't believe that I let him follow me." And I said, "Yeah, I am a little surprised by that, because you're really smart." This girl's an honor student. I mean, she is a very smart person. And I said, "Help me understand that." And she said, You know? I forgot that I didn't know him." And she proceeded to share with me how she had watched him make comments on her friend's pages. And I said, "And what kind of comments was he making?" "Oh, well he was telling them how beautiful they were." And I said, "And you wanted him to write those things on your Face ..." They say they don't use Facebook, whatever. "But you wanted him to write those things to you." And she said, "Yeah, absolutely."

So that's how they get on. They get into those friend groups and once they get in with one person, then they can just get in with a bunch of others. And then they just sit there and they just wait. Traffickers are predators. Let's just say online predators. They're usually pretty smart, and they will wait and they will watch for vulnerability, is what they're watching for. And so they will just wait and they will watch for a teenager or a young person to say, "I hate my parents. They're so stupid." That gives them an end to, "Yeah, mine are stupid too." Right? They want that door to open up, so that they can go in there. They can have a conversation, and then that's when the grooming starts and then they will slowly lure them to them. They never have to take them from a park.

And they're looking for this vulnerability and then, they just swoop in with an empathetic response? Is that-

Absolutely, they love to be the superhero. They love to swoop in and, "Oh yeah. My parents, they're terrible too." And they will just start that conversation. They'll build that false relationship, right. We worked with a little gal. We don't usually work with minors, because we work with over 18, but this little gal, we worked with her briefly and her story was, she'd broken up with her boyfriend. She was very upset. She went online and she said something like, "My boyfriend's broken up with me. I feel so stupid. Nobody's ever going to want to be my boyfriend." And suddenly, there was this guy that messaged her and he said, "Oh my gosh, are you kidding? You're beautiful." And they started building this false relationship. She thought it was a real relationship. She said, she started falling in love with him.

So eventually this guy says, "Hey, I'm going to actually be coming to Colorado to go skiing and would love to get together with you. My parents are actually having dinner with some of their friends and they live in Parker. Isn't that where you live?" "Yeah, that's exactly where I live. Oh my gosh. I would love to officially meet you." And so they were making plans to get together, when fortunately, this girl had a wonderful friend who told on her. She told her mom and her mom contacted the police and the police intercepted this man, who had tries to child pornography and trafficking.

Wow.

I mean, it just happens like that. They get them and then they might drug them. They might force them into a car or something, and then they will take them through a horrible period called, the breaking period and turn them out within about 48 hours.

Wow. And I think that's just one more reason why you don't put your trash on social media.

Exactly.

You don't air your stuff on social media. It's not the venue for it, right. There is a place to be vulnerable.

Absolutely.

Be vulnerable with a friend. Be vulnerable with a family member, parent, whatever. Be vulnerable there, but don't put your trash on social media. Don't do it. "Wow, I can't believe so ..." "And this friend ..." Don't, because you become a target.

Yes.

You become a target. There are people that are looking at that and they don't care one bit about you. They care about using you to make themselves rich.

Mm-hmm.

So let me ask you this question then. I know you get this question a lot, but what advice do you have for parents? So we have teenage boys and girls that are susceptible to this.

Yeah.

I mean, they're not the only one susceptible to it.

Right.

But they are susceptible to it. What advice do you give to parents on how to handle, making sure that your kid doesn't get sucked into this world?

Yeah. We have parents ask us this question all the time and they usually want to know what kind of security system to put in place, and there's a lot of them out there. There's one called ... I can never remember the name. It's like a bark or woof or I don't know. Something along the lines of a dog, something like that. Anyway, I think it's probably great. I mean, I think that those things are somewhat effective, although your teenager is probably smarter than the system you're putting in place. There's a reason why I would give my teenager, my cell phone when something wasn't working on it, instead of taking it to the Apple Store, because they could usually probably figure it out.

Right.

Teenagers are smart, right. And so what we usually tell people is, it comes down to what you say all the time. A relationship matters. Have a relationship with your student. Have a relationship with your child. Try to build that trust with them. The first thing that I think parents want to do is, they just want to take everything away from them. That's not building trust with them. It's also not teaching them to live in this world, right. You don't want to shelter them and protect to a point where then they can't function, when they go out into society. You want to train them, you want to teach them, you want to prepare them for what they're going to see in this world.

So, my son, he got really interested in that video game. I always forget the name of it. The block that you build things.

Minecraft.

Minecraft? Minecraft. I'm not a video game person. I don't get it. That's just not my world, but he was so interested in it. And I had heard that there are people that can have conversations. You can have conversations with other people you don't know and so that kind of concerned me, and so I just became very interested in Minecraft. "Oh, tell me what you're doing. Tell me about that. That's so interesting." And he would share his world with me.

We've got to step into our kids' worlds. Most of the time we wait for them to want to step into ours, but we got to step into our kids' worlds and really just know what's going on, know who their friends are, know who they're hanging out with, know where they're going after school, know what they're doing and build that trust relationship with your child.

Yeah. I remember when our kids were in high school, our three oldest were in high school. It was amazing to me the length at which they could go to work around whatever accountability stuff you put on there. You can put a, "Well, this tracks every text, except for this app, which looks like a game, but then you got a backdoor that goes into an app that's completely untraceable."

Right.

And they're like, "Oh yeah, it's free." I mean, I can tell you this. If you want to police and control your child, that will not work.

Mm-mm.

They will just find a way to work around what you're doing.

Absolutely.

They just will, because kids are sharp like that.

Yeah.

But I think if we can leverage building an actual relationship with them so that when the world falls apart for them not if, but when the world falls apart with them, they come to us with that issue, that conversation. That's the significant piece, but the more we try to control and strangle the life out of them, the more that they're just going to pull away and redirect. And then what it does is, it makes everything happen in secret.

Yes.

And then, you're super dangerous, and now you're super vulnerable to things that are really, really destructive. Let me ask you this question. How does the Church support survivors of trafficking?

Yeah. Boy, there's so much that I believe the Church is a powerful force to be reckoned with, right and there's so much the Church can do. I think one of the most important things though, is that the Church has to get educated on what this actually is. I see things all the time on social media where I'm like, "I'm pretty sure that's not happening but everybody's sharing it. Like some guy walks in and buys a dress at T.J. Maxx and all of a sudden everybody's like, "He's a trafficker." And I'm like, "Poor dude. Maybe he had a daughter or a granddaughter, he was just buying this dress for." But things like this pop up all the time.

You also see these pictures all the time and it's not accurate. So, you'll see a picture of somebody that's chained to a wall or tied up, or they've got tape over their mouth. Here's the thing, a trafficker's prison or a victim's prison is emotional. It's mental, it's not physical. And so, you'll see things all the time where somebody is chained up or tied up or something. You'll see these horrible pictures online all the time. Here's the bottom line. People get more money when they show you pictures like that. I have people tell me all the time, "Jo, your stuff is a little too hopeful. There's a little too much hope in what you post online." They tell me to make it a little darker and we'll get more money. And it's just like, but that's not accurate.

Here's the real danger in believing that trafficking looks a certain way, where somebody's always beat up or chained up or held in an attic or held in a room. We don't see it when it's actually in front of us. We don't see it when it's sitting in the coffee shop just in the next seat, or we don't see it walking down the street. We don't see it in our child's school. We don't see it in our neighborhood, because we have this picture in our head of what it is and it's just not accurate. So, we need to be educated, that's where we have to start. We educate ourselves. We do something. We do education about every three months. We have something, Called Get To Know Covered, where we talk about trafficking, because we're just hitting the surface of it today, but we'll go deeper and really talk more about buyers and predators and online what that looks like.

So I think that's probably the first place that the Church needs to start, is to really get educated on what it is and how to help survivors too, because I think a lot of people see it and it's like, "Oh these poor little survivors. We've just got to keep them in a safe house all the time." No, these people are strong.

Yeah.

They're some of the strongest people I've ever met in my life.

Yeah.

I have such respect for what they've come through and they don't want to be kept in a safe house. They want to get back on their feet. They want a life. We tell people all the time, "This is part of your story. This is not The story. You got a lot of more life to live."

Yeah, that's awesome. And more specifically than for us as a Church, how do we help support your ministry?

Thank you for asking that question. I need a house. Not for me, I have a house myself, but we need a safe house. Those numbers I shared the over 100,000 unique ads that I talked about before, you know we've got 16 beds that are specifically for victims of trafficking here in Colorado. 16, that's it. So, the problem with that is, it forces agencies like ours, it forces police departments, it forces the court system to put people in hotels. Well, the problem with that is you can't get somebody stabilized in the same place they were sold. And so we've got to get a house that they can feel safe and just have a chance to breathe and heal and work with a counselor and stabilize, so that then we can talk about, "Okay, now let's talk about how to get you back on your feet." But that's one of the biggest things that we need, is housing.

We also need donors. I mean, it takes us about $15,200 to get a survivor through a two year program. Now, most of that's going to be housing, but we have some amazing partners that have come alongside of us and they're the reason why we're able to do what we do weekly. So that's a big thing. People ask me all of the time in the Church, "How can we help?" And then I say, "I need you to pray." And they're like, "Oh yeah, but what else?" And I'm like, "No, I really need you to pray."

Right.

My team is going into some of the darkest places and stepping into some of the darkest stories with people. I mean, this is dark stuff. Spiritual warfare, that's a real thing. I always tell my team, "It's not a matter of, if you're going to get attacked. You're going to get attacked. It's just a matter of when." So we need our Churches to pray for us and pray that these traffickers schemes will be discovered, that they will be exposed. Pray that the survivors will heal. Prayer is something that we really depend on. And then we also need volunteers, but we need a really specific type of volunteer.

We need people that are really able to commit to this, because here's the issue. We have lots of volunteer positions, mentors and advocates. We need people to help us in the office. But when we plug somebody in with a survivor, this person has gone through a lot of trauma and they do have some abandonment fears and they get plugged in with a mentor. And if that mentor only sticks around for a couple of months and then they can't do it anymore, what that person hears is, "I am too damaged and my story is too hard for you. Normal people just can't ... They don't want to be around me." And that's just harmful. And so we really need people that are committed. Our volunteers are some of the most committed people I've ever met in my life, and we are run on volunteers. We have about 50 to 70 volunteers that keep us going. So yeah.

Just so that you guys know, I've heard some of the stories that she's told about going into spaces to pull survivors out of where they're at. So when she talks about darkness, I'm like, "You are a bad man Bajamba. I would never. I'm scared of it. I'm scared and I'm so thankful for the Lord's work in your life.

Yeah.

And how He's called you into those dark places. It's just really, really cool.

Yeah.

Can you guys say thank you to her for taking this? I want to make sure that we understand, this is one of those places where we can choose to engage in the kingdom in a profound way, to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight and this is real dark. This isn't fake dark. This is real dark. And so it's a cool opportunity for us to move the kingdom forward, and we're thankful to partner with Covered. I know many of our folks are actually part of your ministry outside of just financially. They're invested, and so very excited to be a part of that.

We're going to take communion together. And I think communion in this context, this is a representation of Jesus laying his life down for us. His death, burial and resurrection, so that we can have access to freedom and healing and hope. This is the reminder of Jesus' sacrifice for us. And I guess part of the question for me is, can we do any less? In light of Jesus' goodness to ask, can we do anything less? And so, maybe as you sit in this room, you're like, "Gosh, I got to get invested in somewhere, whether that's with Covered with some of their survivors or in another way. I got to get invested in people's lives, because helping them move forward is what Jesus has done for me, and how can I do anything less?" Romans 12 says, "This is your only reasonable act of service."

So maybe we ought to spend a minute just, what's the Lord putting on your heart? How can you be involved in Covered? How can you be involved in investing in the lives of people around you? Let's talk with the Lord about that, as we prepare our hearts for communion. Let's pray.

On the night, Jesus was betrayed, He took bread and He broke it. He said, "This is my body, which is given for you. So whenever you eat this bread, do a remembrance of me." Let's remember Him. And then after the dinner, He took a cup and He said, "This cup, this is the blood of the covenant, which is shed for you. So whenever you drink this cup, do a remembrance of me."

Let's pray. Lord we love you and we thank you for shining examples of ministries like Covered that can go onto dark places and just keep being persistent until it bleeds daylight. God, even in those darkest of places, You love everybody. Help us to be people who are brave enough to step into hard spaces in Your name. We love you, Lord. Thanks for your grace, in Jesus' name. Amen.