Rich Dixon on learning tough truths.

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Our 500-mile tour was filled with symbolism.

We began in Cincinnati at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Museum and ended at the Lincoln Memorial. On our final day together, we visited the headquarters of International Justice Mission.

We were prepared to meet lawyers who work worldwide on legal issues regarding justice for trafficked people. We didn’t expect, in a downtown DC office building, to encounter locked doors and security guards.

Turns out, successfully opposing human traffickers makes for some pretty nasty enemies.

I didn’t understand the risks incurred on the front lines of defending justice. We talked about their field offices in dangerous, often lawless countries, the law enforcement officers, the missionaries.

I thought about my tiny, middle-American worldview, how much I didn’t know. I resolved to keep these images in mind…

• There are places where it’s possible to order a child for sex in the same way one orders dessert from the restaurant menu.
• More than half a million teens in the US are forced into prostitution.
• The legal system and law enforcement (and society) too frequently treat these children as criminals and outcasts rather than victims.

In 2012, I didn’t know this stuff. Maybe you didn’t either, but now we do. Now, what?

I wish I could be on the front lines, but I don’t think an old bald guy in a wheelchair would be all that useful in most of those places. So, instead of giving up, I’m inspired by Helen Keller:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

I turned her quote into our group motto:

We do what we can, where we are, with what we have, and trust Jesus for the outcome.

I’m still working on that last part.

To be continued…