Choices

I originally wrote a 1300 word post about the complexities of the idea of “choice” with women involved in the sex industry.  It mentioned kidnapping, physical force, rape, teenagers who are sold by their parents, arraigned marriage, women whose husbands abandon them, lack of education, lack of familial support, having to feed your children, homelessness, awareness of options, economic barriers, untreated trauma resulting from sexual abuse, debt bondage, escape fantasies, materialistic culture, societal values, social stigma, and several other topics.  But it was too long and buried the main point I wanted to make.  Thankfully, Nicolas Kristof wrote a piece yesterday that addressed many of my ultimate concerns (that’s the second time in a week we’ve said almost the same thing), so read his better-written piece on the ignored girls of human trafficking instead.  Just remember that girls like the ones he describes aren’t only in America, but in countries where the more “obvious” forms of trafficking exist as well.  But all that wasn’t the main point of my post anyway.

This was the main point:  We often judge the people who need help, try to figure out whether their situation was their own fault or not (he's a drug addict, she's mentally ill, he had all the chances in the world, she was asking for it, plenty of other people in his situation turned out fine, etc.) and then spread out our compassion and love accordingly, with little going to those people who we judge "deserve" their lot.  However our judgments of people’s motivations and perceived degree of choice in their situation affect our natural willingness to love them and help them out, we must remember that Jesus did not work like that. In the gospels we read the stories of forgiveness for the woman caught in adultery, Zacchaeus the tax collector, the crying woman, the publican who beat his chest before God, the thief on the cross, the Samaritan who was living with a man who was not her husband, and the paralytic whose friends lowered him through the roof.  Jesus never asks how they got in their situation.  Jesus doesn’t berate them for creating their own mess.  Jesus never passes up a needy sinner on the road in order to reach out to someone whose desperate situation may have been less “their fault”.  What Jesus does is reach out with love to every lost person he sees, show his compassion to every desperate person before him, and teach his disciples to do the same.  We don’t know the back stories to why the violent man in the caves became demon-possessed or why the beggar Lazarus had never found employment, and the gospels are certainly silent as to why Mary Magdalene had been involved with prostitution (if that tradition is indeed accurate).  And if Jesus never asked those questions, do we need to ask them?  If Jesus never judged the needy based on their “culpability” for their situation, need we judge them?

 

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do what we can to understand why so many people end up in situations of oppression and address the root causes on a societal scale.  But I am saying that we need to do whatever we can to show Christ’s love to those who are hurting, without the judgmental attitude that they deserve their lot.  Should it matter to me why the boy in front of me started begging, stealing, selling his body for sex?  I know that it shouldn’t.  Do I need to set up a scale to determine who is worthy of Christ’s love and who is not?  I know that I cannot.  What I can try is to love them now, show my care for them as a fellow child of God, and pray that their future chances are better than the ones they’ve had to choose between so far.