Jul
17
The Sweet Dropper has existed for nearly a year now, and a perusal of the archives would tell you that we are not much for stomping about the latest assault on ‘family values.’ If you’re like me, you get more than your share of forwarded emails about these things as it is (and, if you’re like me, you don’t read them either). There is a certain self-righteousness about being perennially indignant about the cause du jour. In fact, if you listen to voices on the far left and the ‘Christian right,’ you’d think they were reading off the same script (’The world as we know it is coming to an end! ______ is the most outrageous and egregious assault on _________ to date and a danger to our country/heritage/environment/rights/liberties/pets, etc. You must join us in taking action/protesting/signing the petition/donating/spaying, etc.”). All this to say: The Sweet Dropper is not a place where we go on and on about “issues.”
Having said that, I do think Christians and others concerned about justice, mercy and faithfulness should be aware of the issue of global slavery. Those who study these things, including the U.S. State Department, estimate that 27 million people (including children) are in debt bondage, forced labor slavery, forced prostitution or trafficked as chattel. In other words, there are more slaves in the world today than were bartered and bought as chattel during the 400 years of the European and American slave trade!
A good place to begin learning about the problem (both as statistics and the human side) is the latest issue of Mission Frontiers, the journal of the U.S. Center for World Missions. Recently, National Geographic magazine shed light on this global blight, and their site contains more resources than you can shake a stick at–as we sometimes say around here. One more resource is International Justice Mission, whose site is also quite good.
If you check out any of this information, I’ll leave it to you as to what to do next. But let’s don’t find ourselves on the receiving end of the same indictment that Jesus made against the Pharisees: ‘you have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness…Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!’ [Matthew 23:23-24]. And I promise: no annoying emails.
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