What Good Is God, They Asked? One Answer Is Grace, Came The Reply

I awoke at 3 am a couple nites ago, and couldn’t go back to sleep. I grabbed a book on my nightstand called What Good Is God? by Philip Yancey, written in 2010. I opened at random, and a chapter appeared entitled Grace, Like Water, Flows Downward. I had read it at least twice before and saw lots of my previous highlights.

The chapter jolted me because Yancey used life-stories to clarify what grace is and what grace does. I needed to read these stories again. The chapter was listed in the Contents as GREEN LAKE: PROFESSIONAL SEX WORKERS. Yancey was attending a conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin, on ministry to women in prostitution – 45 organizations and 35 countries represented. A total of 100 women, all former prostitutes attended.


One prostitute called Hilda, from Costa Rica, told her story:
“When I was four years old, my mother sold me into sexual slavery… As a teenager I got pregnant not once, but twice, and each time my mother took my child from me. She made me go back to the brothel. From then on I worked harder, sometimes double shifts, to earn money to support my children… All my life I felt ugly and dirty, ashamed. I relied on alcohol and cocaine to dull the pain…

One day a customer got furious… He worked me over with a baseball bat, splitting my head open… As I lay in the hospital bed, I plotted to kill myself… Instead, I got on my knees and pleaded with God. And then God gave me a miracle, a vision. He said ‘Look for Rahab Foundation.’

A few days later I left the hospital and showed up, bruised and hemorrhaging, at Rahab Foundations’ door. A kindly woman named Mariliana took me in, cared for me, and told me about God’s love. She smiled and hugged me. She gave me a clean bed, flowers in the room, and a promise that no men would harass me… she told me the home was named for a prostitute in the Bible, Rahab, who became a heroine. Mariliana taught me how to be a real mother, and now I am studying a trade to live for the glory of God.”

Yancey went on to say that in the world there are 25 million women who work in prostitution. Most come from relatively poor countries. Traffickers purchase young women and children in places like Thailand, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union. They promise them glamorous jobs, then install them in strip clubs and brothels in Asia and Western Europe.

Philip Yancey addressed the Green Lake conference with a stirring collection of words and ideas that I can only summarize here by bullet points extracted from his words in the book:
• Some of you in this room know the self-hatred that comes from constantly letting down other people’s expectations, as well as your own.
• I learned that grace, like water, flows downward. I heard at this conference stories of desolation and redemption – what happens when a woman rejected by everyone else suddenly grasps that she is not rejected by God. No matter how low we sink, grace flows to that lowest part.
• The Salvation Army uses the term “trophies of grace” to describe what can happen among the down-and-out.
• Those of you who minister to professional sexual workers encounter potential donors who think these women belong in prison, not in church. But you are following the pattern of Jesus that was misunderstood in his time as well.

• You remind us of the mystery of each person. Each one of us contains multiple selves, a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct.
• All of us have within ourselves the potential for despair and also triumph, sin and salvation, cruelty and compassion, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate.
• Does a woman take up prostitution because of childhood abuse? Economic reasons? Deep-seated loneliness? Chemical imbalance? Poor self-image? It can be a mystery.
• Sex involves far more than the physical body. It touches the soul. Every woman who spoke at the conference told of the scars that result from pretending otherwise.
• Our sexual desires are like the rungs of a ladder that lead us toward beauty, relationship, intimacy, and ultimately toward God who gave us these gifts. Remove the rungs from the ladder though, and you are left with scattered sticks of wood that lead nowhere.

• Human life is irreducible, and plays out much more like a Dostoevsky novel than a manual of [logical] computer software. Some of your prime converts, women sitting near you in this room, will likely fall away, even as some of your harshest opponents will one day embrace you, repentant. We are all fallible.
• Saint Paul discusses a catalog of sins and sinners in Romans chapters 1 and 2 in the Bible. Paul is most scathing about self-righteous people, which in his day meant the Pharisees. There is no-one righteous, not even one, he says.
• God’s grace is the solution to human fallibility. It comes free of charge, apart from any human efforts toward self-improvement.
• For such a free gift, we need only hold out open, needy hands – the most difficult gesture of all for a self-righteously evil person.
• Paul finished by saying, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”
• Philip Yancey observes that people at this conference know about redeemability. “Like the high clear note of a trumpet, the Bible heralds the sure promise that no matter who I am or what I have done, the door to transformation swings open before me.”

Yancey concludes, “We are all trophies of God’s grace, some more dramatically than others. Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls whom you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe.”

Greetings from the Gray Nomad. May the beginnings of summer warm your soul.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house – when you see the naked, that you cover him, and that you hide not yourself from [the needs of] your own flesh and blood?

Then shall your light break forth like the morning, and your healing [your restoration and the power of a new life] shall spring forth speedily.
[Isaiah, chapter 58]