Piloting Faith: A 16 year old child was just sentenced to 51 years in prison.

A Word for the Day...

Did you know that in the United States an estimated 405,000 people are exploited every year in human trafficking? A lot of them are young women, taken from their families at young ages, forced to sell their bodies or their labor in what we now call Modern Slavery.

This past week Cyntoia Brown, a 16-year-old girl who killed the man forcing her to perform acts against her will, was sentenced to 51 years in prison. According to the CNN report, Brown says she was forced into prostitution after a difficult childhood. At her trial, she said a man solicited her for sex and drove her to his house. She resisted him until he appeared to reach under the bed, at which point she believed he was going to kill her. Brown took a gun out of her purse and shot him. Brown was tried as an adult.

I do not doubt that the details of this trial are complicated. But I also know that human trafficking is real and places its victims in impossible circumstances. I can't help but think that if this 16-year-old child had encountered Jesus, he would have honored her vulnerability, understood her pain and wished for her a new chance at life.

May we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear the pain of our sisters and brothers who are forced into modern slavery. May we also have the courage to fight a judicial system that fails to understand the plight of these victims.

- Rev. Cameron Trimble, author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight

Prayer for the Week

God of wisdom,

Graciously grant me the spirit of knowledge today.
Fill me with knowledge when the air is thick with ideas,
and I don't know whom to believe.
Fill me with knowledge when I am plagued by worries.
Help me to hand them over to you
so there's room in my mind
for truer, better thoughts and feelings.

Grant me your spirit of knowledge that I may
trust you completely, and rest in that trust.

Fill all those who call on you
with the same spirit of knowledge that led Jesus,
that helped him know what to say, what to think, what to do.

Yes, may your spirit of knowledge
shine out from our innermost beings,
that we may know and share your presence,
your nature,
and your will at work in the world around us.

Amen.

(adapted from The Prayer Wheel by Patton Dodd, Jana Riess and David Van Biema)