This year, the 21st day of each month signals our special focus on praying about trafficking and modern day slavery. And this lunchtime as we met together to pray, our hearts cried out for the transformation of society – for a dramatic shift towards the kind of comunity God desires.
We heard stories of forced labour and sexual exploitation – girls sold to a brothel; boys taken miles from home to work for nothing but beatings on a cocoa plantation; men and women locked up from dawn til dusk and made to work for a pittance in horrific conditions; child soldiers forced to fight and commit atrocities…
And then we read Isaiah 65:17-25 and heard God’s plan for every life, every community, every nation. And as we held this in tension with the stories we had just heard, our prayers focused on proclaiming these verses over each situation:
For my people will be as long-lived as trees,
my chosen ones will have satisfaction in their work.
They won’t work and have nothing come of it,
they won’t have children snatched out from under them.
And we declared together that this was not just a future hope – but God’s desire for here and now. That every life saved, every community transformed, every nation committed to fighting injustice was a glimpse of heaven, of God’s Kingdom breaking through.
And we recommitted ourselves once again to partner with God in bringing this future hope into a present reality – by praying, by campaigning, by shopping more ethically… knowing always that the God of heaven is already at work freeing lives enslaved on earth today.