Life Without Limits (21 page)

A friend of mine, Ned, recently had the sad task of convincing his parents to move out of their home of forty years and into a senior living center, a nursing home. His father’s health was failing, and the burden of caring for him had endangered his mother’s life too. His parents did not want to move. They preferred to stay in their home, surrounded by neighbors they knew. “We are happy here. Why would we leave?” they said.

Ned talked it over with his parents for more than a year before he convinced them to visit a very nice senior citizens community just a few blocks from their home. They’d formed an image of “old folks’ homes” as cold and dreary places where “old people go to die.” Instead, they found a clean, warm, and lively place where many of their former neighbors were living and enjoying active days. It had a medical clinic staffed with doctors and nurses and therapists who could take over some of the care for Ned’s father that had weighed so heavily on his mother.

Once his parents had a vision of the new place, they agreed to move there. “We never thought it could be so nice,” they said.

If you have difficulty moving from where you are to where you need to go, it may help to get a clear vision of where the move will take you. This may mean scouting out a location, trying new relationships, or shadowing someone in a career you might want to pursue. Once you are more familiar with the new place, it will be easier to leave the old one.

This is a tough stage for many people. Imagine you are climbing a rock wall in the mountains. You are halfway up the wall, hundreds of feet above the valley floor. You have just come to a small ledge. It’s scary, and you know you would be vulnerable if the wind picked up or a storm moved in, but on that ledge you have at least some sense of security.

The problem is that to keep moving up, or even to head back down, you have to abandon the security of that ledge and reach for another hold. Letting go of that sense of security, however tenuous, is the challenge, whether you are rock climbing or taking a new path in life. You have to release your hold on the old and grab on to the new. Many people freeze at this stage, or they start to make the move but then get scared and chicken out. If you find yourself in this situation, think of yourself as climbing a ladder. To move to the next rung, you must give up your grip and reach for the next one. Release, reach, and raise yourself up, one rung at a time!

This can be another tricky stage for people. They may have let go of the old and moved up to the new, but until they attain a certain comfort level, they can still be tempted to go running back. It’s the
Okay, I’m here, now what?
stage.

The key to settling in is to be very careful about the thoughts that play out in your head. You have to screen out panic-mode thoughts like
Oh my gosh, what did I do?
and focus forward along the lines of
This is a great adventure!

In my first few months in the United States as a boy, I struggled with the acceptance stage mightily. I spent many days and nights twitching uncomfortably in my bed, fretting about my new environment.
I hid out from other students, fearing rejection and mockery. But slowly, gradually, I came to enjoy certain aspects of my new home. For one thing, I had cousins here too; I just hadn’t known them as well as my cousins back in Australia. My American cousins turned out to be great people. Then there were the beach and the mountains and the desert, all within easy reach.

Then, just as I began to think maybe California USA wasn’t so bad, my parents decided to return to Australia. When I got older and finished college, I moved right back to California. Now, it feels like home to me!

This is the best stage of making a successful transition. You’ve made the leap, and now it’s time to grow in the new environment. The fact is that you really can’t keep growing without change. Although the process can be stressful and even downright painful emotionally and even physically, the growth is usually worth it.

I’ve seen that in my business. A few years ago I had to restructure my company. That meant letting some people go. I am horrible at firing people. I absolutely hate it. I’m a nurturing kind of guy, not a bloke who likes to bring the bad news down on those I care about. I still have nightmares about firing staff members whom I’d come to know and love as friends. But looking back, my company never would have been able to grow if I hadn’t made that change. We’ve reaped the rewards. I can’t say that I’m glad to have let go those former employees; I miss them still.

Growing pains are a sign that you are stretching and reaching for new heights. You don’t have to enjoy them, but know that they always come before a breakthrough that leads to better days.

In my travels I’ve observed people in each of these stages of change, especially during the 2008 trip to India that I described before. I went to speak in Mumbai, India’s largest city and the second most populated city in the world. Once known as Bombay, Mumbai is on India’s west coast, on the Arabian Sea, and serves as its financial and cultural center.

This city, home to both great wealth and terrible poverty, has been in the public spotlight because it served as the setting for the Academy Award–winning movie
Slumdog Millionaire
. As great as it is, that film offered only brief glimpses into the horrors of Mumbai’s slums and the sexual slave trade that flourishes in a city dominated by Hindus and Muslims, with only a small population of Christians.

It’s estimated that more than half a million people are forced to sell their bodies in Mumbai. Most are kidnapped from small villages in Nepal, Bangladesh, and other rural areas. Many of the women are
devadasi
, worshippers of a Hindu goddess who were forced into prostitution by their “priests.” Some of the prostitutes are male
hijras
, castrated men. They are packed into filthy tenement houses and forced to have sex with at least four men a night. They have spread the AIDS virus rapidly, and millions have died.

At one point I was taken to the red-light district known as the “Street of Cages” in Mumbai to see the suffering there and to speak to the victims of slavery. I had been invited by the Reverend K. K. Devaraj, founder of Bombay Teen Challenge, which works to rescue people from sexual slavery and help them find better, healthy lives.

Uncle Dev, who also operates a home for AIDS orphans, feeding programs, medical centers, an HIV/AIDS clinic, and a rescue operation for drug-addicted “street boys,” had seen my videos, so he hoped that I could serve as a change agent in Mumbai. He wanted
me to convince women working as prostitutes to flee slavery and to move into his shelters. Reverend Devaraj says that each enslaved woman is a “precious soul and valuable pearl.”

Bombay Teen Challenge is such a force for good in the slums of Mumbai that the pimps and madams allow Uncle Dev and his team, who are Christians, to come in and speak to them, even though most are Hindu. They welcome that calming influence even though the Bombay Teen Challenge team constantly tries to convince the prostitutes to accept Christ and to leave the brothels for better lives.

Bit by bit, this ministry works to change the hearts of these enslaved women. The average girl is kidnapped between the age of ten and thirteen. They are lured from small rural villages, and most are very naïve. If a girl is wary, the recruiters try to win over her parents, telling them she will earn fifty times the average wage. Or, sadly, they buy the girl from her parents, an all-too-common occurrence. The people who recruit and transport them are the first in a long line of cruel abusers. Once the girls are captive, the pimps take control, telling them, “You work for us now, whether you like it or not.”

While in Mumbai, we interviewed several former sex slaves who’d been freed by Bombay Teen Challenge. Their stories, each one heartbreaking, are unfortunately not unusual. If they refused to be prostitutes, they were beaten, raped, and put in cages in dark and filthy underground compounds where they couldn’t even stand up. There they were starved, abused, and brainwashed all the more until they became submissive. Then they were sent to the brothels where they were told that they had been purchased for seven hundred U.S. dollars and that they had three years to work off the debt as prostitutes. Former sex slaves told us they’d been required to have sex hundreds of times, with two dollars applied to their debt each time.

Most think they have no other options. The pimps tell them
that their families will never take them back because of the shame they’ve brought to them. Many contract sexually transmitted diseases or have children as the result of their prostitution and so they feel they have nowhere else to go.

As horrendous as life is for these girls and women, they often are afraid to make a change. Without faith, they lose hope, and then they lose their humanity. They despair of ever making it out of slavery and the slum. Psychologists often see the same resistance to escaping in women who are in abusive relationships. They may live in fear and pain, but they refuse to leave the abuser because they are more fearful of the unknown. They have lost their ability to dream of a better life, so they can’t see it.

You may clearly see that these sex slaves should flee their terrible lives, but do you always see your own situation with such clarity? Have you ever felt trapped in circumstances, then discovered that the only trap was your own lack of vision, lack of courage, or failure to see that you had better options?

To make a change, you must be able to envision what lies on the other side. You have to have hope and faith in God and in your ability to find something better.

The Bombay Teen Challenge recognizes that women who have been enslaved have difficulty seeing a way out because they are so beaten down, isolated, and threatened. Some say they can’t believe that they are worthy of love or even decent treatment.

I witnessed firsthand the suffering in the brothels and slums of Mumbai, and I also saw the miracles that Uncle Dev and his dedicated missionaries are performing among the sex slaves and their children, known as “sparrows,” who often live homeless, on the streets.

They took me from one house to another. In the first I was introduced to an old woman who rose slowly from the floor as we entered. She was a madam who, through an interpreter, invited me in to “preach to my whores and inspire them to be better.”

The madam introduced me to a woman who looked to be in her forties. She told me that she’d been kidnapped from her rural home at the age of ten and forced into prostitution.

“I worked off my debt and was free to go at thirteen,” she said through an interpreter. “I went out into the street for the first time, and I was beaten and raped. Still I made my way back to my family, but they didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I came back here and returned to work as a prostitute. Then I had two children, and one died. Two days ago I found out that I have AIDS, so my pimp fired me. And now I have a child to look after and nowhere to go.”

From our perspective, you and I may see that she had options, but in her much narrower circumstance there seemed to be no alternatives. Understand that sometimes you may not see a way out, but know that change is always possible. When you can’t find an alternate path, look for help. Seek guidance from those with a wider perspective. Whether it’s a friend, a family member, a professional counselor, or a public servant, don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking there is no escape. There is always a way out!

This woman was just twenty years old. I prayed with her. We told her that she could leave the brothel and live in housing provided by Bombay Teen Challenge while also receiving medical treatment at their clinic. Once we opened her eyes and showed her the way out to a more caring world, she was not only willing to change, she found faith as well.

“Hearing you speak, I know God chose not to heal me of HIV/AIDS because I can bring other women to Christ,” she said. “I have nothing left, but I know God is with me.”

The peace and hope in her eyes took my breath away. She was so beautiful in her faith. She said she knew God had not forgotten her, that He had a purpose for her even as she faced death. She was a changed woman who had transformed her suffering into a force for
good. Amid so much poverty, despair, and cruelty, she was a radiant example of the power of God’s love and the strength of the human spirit.

Uncle Dev and his missionary team have developed a number of methods for convincing Mumbai’s sex slaves to leave their dangerous situations. They provide child care and schools so that kids can learn about Jesus and His love for them. The kids then tell their mothers that they too are loved and that they can move to a better life. I encourage you to embrace change that elevates your life and to be a force for change that uplifts the lives of others too.

W
hen I was eleven years old, my parents took me to the beach on Australia’s Gold Coast. My mum and dad walked down the coast a bit, and I was just chillin’ in the sand near the edge of the water, watching the waves and basking in the breeze. I covered up with an oversize T-shirt so I wouldn’t get sunburned.

A young woman came walking along the beach, and as she approached, she smiled and said, “That’s quite impressive!”

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing that she wasn’t referring to my huge biceps.

“How long did it take you to bury your legs like that?” she said.

I realized that she thought I’d hidden my legs in the sand somehow. Feeling mischievous, I played along.

“Oh, I had to dig such a long time,” I said.

She laughed and strolled by, but I knew she could not resist a second look so I waited. Sure enough, just as her head swiveled for a parting glance, I popped up and hopped toward the water.

She didn’t say anything, though she stumbled a bit as she scurried down the beach.