I don't doubt for a second that God created us with a persistant and underlying craving for something more. It drives us to thirst for Him, whether we are actually aware of what will fill us, or not. And it's so essential that we long for Jesus, but the power of the void created in our souls without Him is rampantly destructive.
I'm staying in Phuket, Thailand right now, near the district of Patong. In the middle of Patong, there is this one street called Bangla Road. And on Bangla road there are a couple hundred bars. At each bar there are several prostitutes. There is this darkness over the whole district. When I go there I can literally see it. Our heads hurt when we go there, and not just because of the music, we get stomach pains and it is hard to breathe, and not just because of the cigrette smoke. It's the devil. He lives in that little corner of hell, where he has such a tight grasp on all the people that they expertly fake happiness. There are families there. Eight year old girls, twelve year old boys, walking around with their parents as if almost completely naked, bonded women are a normal family tourist attraction. There are men there - young and old. Some of them walk around with Thai girls attached to their arms, buying them things and forcing kisses on them, so incredibly desperate to feel love that they try to purchase a crude, empty fantasy. Women are on every table, numbly swinging around poles because if how could they feel any longer? What choice do they have but to turn their hearts to stone and feel like they are as valuable and as lovable, as the piece of meat they are advertised to be. They stand in glass cases, their sex on display, and men go in, even women, and they pay the price required in a heartless attempt to feel some kind of twisted sin-bathed pleasure. Greed and lust doesn't satisfy, and the Patong streets are a testiment to a market for perversion - surguries that put breasts on men and bonded, abused children behind closed doors. Bangla road was founded for sex tourism - the sickening concept of rape after rape and of lies after lies. It's appauling and repulsive. Satan must smile when he thinks of the the grasp he has on that place and that alone makes my teeth clench in righteous anger.
So praise God for His power to redeem. To restore, to heal, to convict and to LOVE. Praise God for rescue from the world. And at the same time, mourn. Break and be furious - not at the men who buy or the ladies who offer or the owners who exploit or the tracffickers who trick, but at the emptiness of the world. The end.
