Thailand: now that I have seen....

So what did we do there? I know that is the question everyone tends to ask first. I will go on to share with you the details, but I want everyone to be interested in knowing something. My heart is not to just have you pat us on the back and say "what a good job you guys did," "it must have been hard," or "I admire you more." If those are your thoughts as you come away from reading this, then you have missed the point. I want people to have a better understanding of what actually happens in this world, and to develop a heart to partner with me to see it change.
This post is most likely going to be the hardest one to talk about, so please just bare with me. I found that if you ask for God to break your heart for the nations, you have no idea what you are really asking for. I am grateful for prayers to be answered, but the answer to this one was overwhelming. With just one glimpse of the world through His eyes in Thailand and Cambodia, is enough to bring you to your knees. God did just that.
I had no idea of what I was getting myself into when I made the decision to work with prostitutes in Thailand. It sounds like a logical thing to do when you have a team of all girls, but the implications of it all were not quite thoroughly thought through. There is no way to prepare someone fully for what it looks like to walk right into the centre of the red light district in Pattaya knowing full well that these were the women we would be working with. Walking down a kilometre long strip of just bars, prostitutes, and male sex tourists, is enough to make your stomach churn. The first time we walked down into it, we all were wide eyed and did not say one word to eachother. To anyone else on that road that day, it must have been obvious that we had just stumbled into something we had never seen before and never thought even existed.
To see such blatent sin is enough to lose all confidence in seeing such a world change. Each night we would have to talk about all that we saw and understand that we are not called to hate the sinner, but the sin. However, when you sit at a bar with the intention to build a friendship with the woman behind it and a man sits beside you with the intention to buy that same girl for the night, it is incredibly hard not to hate him. God has since changed my heart to understand that these men are hurting, and their stories are to be heard as well.