Speaking at Church

Posted on November 1, 2013 by opendooreurope

My gut clenches, sweat beads on my upper lip, my mind races is twelve different directions, my mouth goes dry, and my hands shake—why? Because I’m speaking at my church this evening. And it’s not because anybody has twisted my arm—I want to do this. When I’m in the US, I want to speak as often as possible to anyone who will listen about Europe as a mission field. But I’ve always had a fear of public speaking, and even though it usually goes really well, and the audience is very sympathetic and supportive, that fear is lurking just out of sight, ready to make my voice crack or make me forget what I was going to say.

Fear of speaking in public is one of the most common fears around. Most of us would rather face a roaring lion, armed with nothing but a Twinkie than speak in front of an audience. But like I said, I want to do this. Facing-down this fear is the measure of how strong my calling is for Europe. If I didn’t do this, I would feel like I had abandoned my calling.

Europe is the forgotten mission field. A professor of foreign missions at Abilene Christian University told me that he asks his students at the beginning of the semester what is the mission field with the most need. They invariably answer Africa. Then after he has demonstrated to them that Africa is far more Christian than Europe, he will ask them again, and many times the answer is still Africa. The economic need tugs at their heartstrings, even though Europe is in far worse need spiritually. Operation World calls Europe by far the “most secular, least Christian” continent on earth (pg. 79). Europe also has the most un-reached people groups of any region in the whole world—including the Middle East. Africa is now sending missionaries to Europe.

Slavery – Human trafficking is epidemic in Europe because the relaxed borders have made it easier to transport people from Eastern Europe (primarily Ukraine, Czech Republic, Moldova, and Romania) to Western Europe (Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany).
Poverty – People think of Europe as a rich peoples’ playground. And it’s true that rich people do vacation in Europe, but the average European makes far less money than the average American, and lives a simpler life. Furthermore, the third world exists throughout Europe at the edge of every city: in gypsy camps of staggering poverty. The gypsy children live in shockingly unsanitary conditions. Many gypsy children are denied an education due to their nomadic family life. Gypsy children are expected to bring money back to the patriarchs, the grandparents. They beg, steal, or work as prostitutes to bring money back to the family, and if they fail to bring back money or to bring back enough money, they are beaten. Sometimes their legs are broken and set in crazy ways that will turn your stomach. Sometimes their legs are cut off—giving them more sympathetic appeal. Many gypsy children are sold to sex traffickers or organ traffickers.
Homelessness – Homelessness is a huge problem. Budapest has an estimated 30,000 homeless people. I saw lots of homeless people when I was there, and the homeless of Budapest are unlike homeless people I’ve ever seen anywhere else. There are so many of them that they have simply lost all hope. They don’t even ask for money, they just curl up in doorways and in the subway entrances. (This is all recounted in my book, Look, Listen, Love.)
Suicide – Suicide is rampant throughout Europe, especially in the current economic climate. Fourteen of the top twenty countries with the highest suicide rates are in Europe. Switzerland legalized suicide in 1941, and under Swiss law, you do not have to have a lethal diagnosis to ask for physician-assisted suicide; you don’t even have to be Swiss! That means that if someone is depressed and wants to end their life, they can go to Switzerland, which is conveniently in the middle of the continent, and pay a doctor to help them kill themselves, and they don’t have to get any kind of counseling. In fact, the doctors would be against counseling because they make money on each suicide. Now suicide is also legal in the Netherlands. In Milan, where suicide is still illegal, and Switzerland is only an hour away, about once a month or so, somebody jumps in front of a speeding subway train. In fact, it is such a common occurrence that people have lost all sympathy for the victim and his or her family, instead they just become annoyed at the inconvenience that the suicide has caused them as they rush through their day.
Drugs – The city of Amsterdam is uniquely problematic because they have de-criminalized both prostitution and marijuana. Legalizing pot use has been discussed from time to time here in the US. The arguments for legalization seem very logical and reasonable, particularly when it comes to saving taxpayer money and law enforcement manpower. But before getting onto the bandwagon, you should take a trip to Amsterdam to see what legalized pot use looks like. Marijuana is only legal in the marijuana coffeehouses, but it doesn’t stay in the coffeehouses. And because pot is legal, tourists think that other drugs are also legal—they are not. No matter how harmless you may think it is, the fact is that marijuana is a gateway drug. The dealers of illegal drugs situate themselves along the canal in the Red Light district (more about that in a moment) and peddle their drugs to passers-by. They don’t stand around looking villainous, but instead they are very friendly. The dealers speak English and often the major European languages. Amsterdam is the number one partying destination in Europe, possibly in the world. So lots of young men travel to Amsterdam for legal sex with prostitutes and legal marijuana use. Many of them are lured into trying the harder drugs as well. The result is that the streets of Amsterdam are filthy with trash and vomit and people that are either homeless or too high to remember how to get back to where they are staying. The streets are also very loud all night long, with the sounds of hell-raising. There are so many people who are addicted to heroin that the city has started giving out free needles to try and keep the risk of HIV transmission low. So the parks are full of addicts that are shooting-up. And the free needle program has done nothing to stop the spread of HIV. Prostitution – Legalized prostitution in Amsterdam was supposed to help prevent the spread of HIV by having the Dutch Minister of Health responsible for making sure that all the window girls stayed healthy and conducted business in ways that reduced the possibility of transmission (i.e. washing the customers and using condoms). However, that has turned out to be impossible to enforce. Plus, the presence of legal prostitutes has not stopped or even slowed down illegal prostitution in the Netherlands. Let’s face it, supply follows demand.
The idea behind legalizing prostitution seemed like a good idea, but prostitution plays a part in all the above behaviors, like a European version of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but worse because of the whole drug issue discussed above. People believe that the window girls are independent businesswomen—they are not—at least not all of them. Many of the window girls come from other countries, mostly Eastern Europe and Africa. Those girls got there because they answered ads for jobs, and some even paid intermediaries who turned out to be traffickers to get them illegally into Europe. Few, if any, of them set out to work in prostitution. Like I said, the relaxation of borders within the European Union has actually worked to the traffickers’ advantage. And even if some of the women are voluntarily working in the windows of the Red Light district, they have invariably been sexually abused as children. As a woman, I can tell you that no little girl dreams of having dozens of sweaty, smelly men use and use and use her all day and all night long. Prostitutes use the same survival strategy that victims of physical abuse use: they have learned how to zone-out and not be in their bodies while it is happening. Despite the lies that the johns tell themselves, that doesn’t sound like it’s something they enjoy, does it? All of this means that Amsterdam, an otherwise lovely city, has become a haven for potheads, traffickers, drug dealers, and drug addicts.
Cynicism – The young people of Europe are among the most hopeless and cynical in the world. They go to university only to find that they are still unemployed and unemployable. East European youth are leaving their homelands in droves, seeking employment in the west. The employers take advantage of that desperation and pay them lower wages, and giving them the jobs that West Europeans don’t want. Most of the janitors in Italy are Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, or Polish. Because they feel powerless, the youth are drawn into witchcraft and satanism. They recognize that there is genuine spiritual power therein, but don’t have the discernment to know the good from the evil. Turin, Italy is the European capital for satanism. Every so often, there is a ritually sacrificed body (either human or animal) found in the woods near Turin. It has become such a common occurrence that the news agencies have stopped reporting these findings. Many of these young people consider traditional religion a waste of time, and they don’t want to hear about anything of a religious nature. For this reason, missionaries in Europe have had to be very creative in sharing the Gospel.

I could continue, but I think this post is long enough. So, I take a deep breath, pray for at least an hour, and go pour my heart out for an hour or so about Europe. Suddenly, I understand exactly what Jeremiah meant when he said that if he tries to keep silent, God’s Word is like a fire shut up in his bones. God is good, and I want more missionaries to share His goodness with this lost and dying continent.

An Emotional Day

Posted on May 2, 2013 by opendooreurope

We met at the church to hear about the history of the Jewish people of Vienna. A brief overview shows that the Jews were welcome in Vienna, then persecuted and either killed or driven out (whenever they needed a scapegoat), then they were welcomed again and the cycle repeated.

Yesterday was rather like that for me: emotions up and down and up again. After the teaching we went to the city center and divided into 2 groups: prayer for the churches and prayer for the Jews. It was so hard to decide because I really wanted to go with both groups—and I was not the only one. So I put off the decision until the moment came to decide. The church group had far fewer members, so I went with them. And that was a good decision because my calling is for the church (missionaries), even though I do have a strong love for Israel.

We went into St. Stephan’s Cathedral there in the center. One teammate said that there was a chapel with Israeli etchings or something. I didn’t really catch exactly what it was, but we found a chapel that was set apart from the rest of the cathedral and had a glass door. The door was shut, but not locked, so we went inside. I don’t think that was the place we were looking for, but it was a perfect place to pray, with stools set in a circle around the room. To my delight, I found a kneeler, so I knelt to pray. Our prayers were full of emotion, which is not unusual, but the intensity and range of emotions was very unusual: one teammate lay on the floor weeping, then another started a battle prayer and we all roared (in our spirits), then spontaneous laughter as the Sweet Holy Spirit fell upon us. It was powerful. We had intended to pray there for 20 minutes, but in the end, we were there 40 instead. I had not been aware of the passage of time, nor had the others.

We moved on to the “New City” area near the Danube River. This was a whole area of new apartment buildings near a bridge. A prophet had recently prophesied that Jesus would enter the city of Vienna by crossing this bridge. The place where we had wanted to pray was closed off for construction, and although this was Labor Day for Austria, there was a workman there who let us into the construction area. We began searching for a good place to pray. First we found too much sun, then a shady area near the workman, but he had just turned on a noisy machine. Finally we found a small sandbox play area in the shade. There we prayed, proclaimed, and welcomed Jesus to enter Vienna.

I kicked off my sandals and enjoyed the cool sand on my feet. After prayers one of the teammates (a man from Slovakia) and I danced and sang a joyful song, waving flags. Then we went back to the center and got Italian gelatos while we waited for the other prayer team to arrive.

From there we went to a prayer meeting where several churches attend together. We prayed for the sick and there were many miraculous healings. Then we broke into groups of 3-4 and prayed a few minutes for the topics given to us. When we were told to pray for trafficked people the mood changed from joyful and triumphant prayers to brokenhearted prayers. I was reminded of the girls that Clara (the pastor’s wife from Romania) had told me about.

I also thought about a friend from Eastern Europe who had recently told me that she had been a prostitute. You would never imagine it. She’s a sweet twenty-something Christian girl, who had thought that she had no future. But she met Jesus and found that she is worth so much more than all the money that men had paid to use her body.

Thinking about these girls broke my heart, and I cried my heart out for them and for all their sisters. I was not the only one to weep for them. Tears are prayers, too.

When we returned to the church, I flopped down on the floor, kicked off my sandals, and put my feet up. It felt good to rest. After dinner we laughed, but not with our usual hilarity. I think we were all just so tired. It had been a good, but emotionally draining day. God is good!

Take a Walk

Posted on April 10, 2013 by opendooreurope

“Take a walk,” the Lord told me. So I put on a light jacket and headed out. It was a nice, sunny day, and much warmer than it has been in months. When I got to the piazza near my house, I took out my camera and took some pictures of the flowering trees—straight overhead shots so that they were against that background of clear blue. I took another picture of petal litter because the trees are raining petals. Petals make a much prettier fall than leaves in autumn, and they smell a lot better, too.

Yesterday was a miserable day. It is always difficult eating again after a 3 week fast. Your stomach has to re-learn how to digest solids, and the size has shrunken. I know this, and had eaten only a very small meal, but it was still too much. I woke up with severe stomach cramps (not abdominal, these were localized to the organ, itself). Then about 12 hours after eating it, the meal came back up, untouched by digestive acids. The Lord told me to lay on my left side, and I was able to sleep. But when I rolled onto my right side, my stomach immediately cramped again. It felt like a rock a little bigger than my fist, just under my heart. You can’t even imagine the pain.

Now, some people will read that and say, “Why fast, then?” Fasting is an important spiritual practice. I just haven’t gotten very good at getting back into eating again. But there are things that you must fast and pray to get to a deeper level. Am I going to quit fasting just because I go through some physical pain? (Really excruciating pain!) No! Because it is more important to me to have that time of closeness with God. Besides, He did help me through it.

About mid-afternoon I began to feel better, but still not 100%. I went to bed about 7:30 and slept 8 hours straight through—something I haven’t done in decades. This morning, although I woke early, I felt really good. I had some business to take care of (printer problems and a dishwasher that sometimes wouldn’t drain), but those things that had seemed enormous when I was feeling so bad turned out to be very easily and cheaply fixed. And that’s when the Lord told me to take a walk.

But flowering trees and petal litter, although nice, were not why He had me get out. My spirit’s attention was called to 3 things:

A notice about a missing cat
A street vendor hawking his wares
A massage parlor

You don’t see this so much in the US, but here in Italy there are people who set up tables outside the subway entrances or the grocery stores and sell belts, hats, sunglasses, umbrellas, cellphone covers, or purses. Many of them have their spot and will return there daily to set up shop. These people do not have a license and do not pay VAT (or in Italy the Partita IVA). They are illegal. The laws are not enforced rigorously enough to prevent them from their activities.

I knew this already. But the Lord showed me that these vendors are modern day slaves. They came here based on the promise of a better life, and many actually risked their lives to get here. Now they work for a boss who supplies their goods and takes their profits. They live in wretched conditions without legal documents, afraid of what will happen to them and to their families if they don’t sell enough.

The massage parlor is also a place of slavery, and there are massage parlors every few blocks throughout Milan. At first I innocently believed that the Milanese were just a very stressed-out bunch of people. But then I began to notice that the massage parlors had names like Desiderio (desire), and had pictures of beautiful women either draped as when receiving a massage or scantily clad and giving a massage. One even had a picture of one of the rooms which had a double bed. My older son is a massage therapist and he uses a massage table. The massage table is high enough not to hurt the back of the massage therapist. It is very firm, though padded, and is actually less wide than a single bed. There is no legitimate reason for a double bed in a massage parlor.

Traditionally, the police have arrested or chased away both of these kinds of slaves, succeeding only in scattering them briefly. The only country that has had any effect upon stopping prostitution is Sweden (see Nefarious Merchant of Souls for more information). The US doesn’t see much of the street vendors because the laws are enforces, but that only drives the vendors indoors, where they set up sweatshops to do tailoring or manufacturing of cheap goods, or nail salons. I would be very interested to see what we find if we investigated all the people who work in the nail salons.

There are 27 million slaves in the world today—more than in all history combined. And this is despite the fact that slavery is illegal in virtually every country of the world. We can’t afford to ignore this any longer. Money paid to sweatshops or street vendors goes right back to the traffickers. Hit them where it hurts: in the wallet. Make a decision today.

Oh, yes, and the cat? Just like that lost kitty, there are families that have lost their loved ones into the black hole of slavery, never to hear of them again. Take a walk.

Nefarious – Merchant of Souls

Posted on March 20, 2013 by opendooreurope

Day Four

Greetings from Bologna!

I came here to see the screening of Nefarious. Nefarious is a film about human trafficking (modern slavery), the vast majority of which is for purposes of prostitution. The film is a deeply disturbing documentary which chronicles the lives of prostitutes in Europe, Thailand, and the US. The organization that produced the film is Exodus Cry (http://exoduscry.com/).

The word nefarious means extremely wicked or villainous, and that describes the traffickers and also the men who frequent prostitutes.

The girls in the film had been rescued from prostitution. Some described how they were tricked into prostitution by boyfriends who turned out to be traffickers. Others told how they had been kidnapped. Both of these went through a process of breaking-down their will and their resistance. This process involves isolation, humiliation, drugging, severe beatings, and repeated rape until all the fight has gone out of them—along with any self-esteem or human dignity.

Some girls were made to strip naked and walk in line across a stage in a slave auction for buyers to bid on. These buyers were the owners of brothels and massage parlors throughout Europe. Often the buyers would manhandle them, forcing them to open their mouth and show their teeth, checking them over like merchandise. Some buyers asked to “try the product” before they buy.

Some of the girls had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents in Eastern Europe. One described how the orphanage director had encouraged the girls to “go off with the boys and have some fun.” They were prostituting them. Then when they reached 18 years of age, the traffickers came to pick them up from the orphanage and they were never heard from again. East European girls have been trafficked into prostitution all around the world. Their passports have been stolen by their captors. They are invisible because they have no family, and usually they have no knowledge of the language in the place where they end up, except for what they need to know for working in prostitution. The traffickers prey upon the most vulnerable: orphans and children.

Anywhere there is prostitution, there is trafficking. The legalization of prostitution only helps the traffickers by giving them a “legitimate” market. But legalization in no way means that the girls are working as prostitutes by choice. The only girls in the film who had entered prostitution voluntarily had been lured by the glamour of becoming a high-priced Las Vegas call girl. They dreamed of meeting and marrying a high-roller who could give them a luxurious lifestyle. They were each disillusioned by the realities of prostitution. Part of that reality is that some of the clients are men who hate women with a murderous passion. All of the women had suffered beatings and strangling. The thing that each of the voluntary prostitutes had in common was a history of sexual abuse as children, and the low self-esteem that comes with being the victim of abuse.

The purpose of the film is to educate the public about this extreme evil that exists all over the world. The film also shows the only country in the world in which prostitution has virtually ended: Sweden. Sweden’s approach is simple and effective: severely punish the clients and the traffickers. In effect: stop the demand and prostitution stops.

Exodus Cry works on a 3 point attack: Prevention, Intervention, and Restoration. The ultimate goal is to have people who are healed: physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and not only the girls, but also the clients and traffickers, whenever possible.

So what does all this have to do with my fasting and prayer for understanding of the things to come? I believe that it is just a confirmation of darkness of these End Times days. It’s confirmation that I am on the right track by fasting and praying for understanding. Most of these girls were deceived in one way or another. When the Antichrist comes upon the world stage, he will come with such great deception that even the elect, God’s chosen ones, will be in grave danger of falling for his lies. This calls for us to be alert—super-alert! We cannot afford to coast through these days on auto-pilot.

You can get involved with Exodus Cry through: Prayer, Awareness, Reform, and Donation. Exodus Cry is above all a prayer movement. They wisely recognize that none of this will change without prayer. They also realize that nothing will change without laws that punish the men who exploit women and children. I want to encourage each of you to support Exodus Cry with your prayers and finances. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Now that you know, you have the obligation to help the “least of these.” God is good! Go do good, too!

Walking By Faith in Europe

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