Labels. Categories. Boxes.

"Does anybody hear her?  Can anybody see?  Does anybody even know she's going down today?  Under the shadow of our steeple, with all the lost and lonely people searching for the hope that's tucked away in you and me."

That verse seems to be playing on an endless loop inside my head.  Does anybody hear her? Can anybody see?  My heart has become heavy of late for those in our society that seem to be labeled "throwaway." 

Throwaway.  Disposable.  Useless.  Unredeemable.  Unworthy.  Unlovable.

The homeless, runaways, drug addicts, prostitutes, imprisoned, abused, the list is long and ugly.  It is full of prejudice, complacency, pain, misunderstanding, hopelessness, and apathy.  It's full of PEOPLE. 

People who each have their own story of what happened in this life to bring them to the place they are today.  Each of us is weak.  Each of us is strong.  When those weak times come, it matters who is beside you and within you.  It matters, because every single solitary one of us could end up on that list at any time. 

And maybe that is why it is easy to turn a blind eye and cold heart.  Does acknowledging the list touch a spot deep within that reminds us we aren't so far from them? Or, does believing we are different than them help us believe we could never be where they have ended up?  Do we turn a blind eye to keep ourselves from noticing the fall from where we are to where they are is really infinitesimally small?

There but for the Grace of God, go I.

I very well could have ended up on that list, so many times.  I was regarded and treated as a nothing during my time as a sex slave, a human trafficking victim.  My abuse was hidden away inside the walls of private homes and townhouses.  I wasn't so different from those society labels as "prostitutes".  Most of them are not there by choice but by force. Prostituted, not prostitutes.  Most are victims just like I was.  Yet, they are forced to walk the streets.  Heaped upon the abuse of being used as a human sex toy, is the degradation of society, as we look down upon them from our 'normal, upstanding lives' (interject sarcasm)

Which one could you have been?  The runaway, the druggie, the alcoholic, the bum, the criminal? 

What within each of us creates the need to label and segregate? Didn't our Lord not only create us all, but die for us all, as well?  What person did He ever create and then consider to be a mistake or a throwaway? 

Today, I challenge all of us to ask God to allow us to see His people as He does.  Ask Him to remove the worldly lens you have been looking through for so long.  Once that lens is removed you won't want it back and you won't be the same.

Now.....what do you see?

  ~kathy