It's hard to love a pimp

Marcia Moston

I was blistering with bad thoughts as I drove to my interview with Switch 42:16, a ministry here in Greenville that works with prostituted women. The more I learned about sex trafficking, the more I became angry with the pimps and people who fuel the demand.

I had compassion for the women trapped in this insidious industry, but I had none. Zero. Not a speck of love, compassion or room for prayer for the traffickers. In fact, I was delighting in some of the imagery the psalmists used in praying against the enemies of God: “Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime.”—Psalm 57— or like “chaff before the wind.”

Then, out of nowhere, a whole different thought intruded in my righteous reverie, causing it to implode faster than a balloon in a briar patch.

“I died for him too.”

Ah, man. I wanted to argue about it, but you know when you suspect it’s the Lord. There’s not much to say. I think he was setting me up for what I was about to see. When I arrived at the church, the Switch team was assembling Christmas gift bags for the women in the strip clubs, the women on the street corners and, yes, can you believe it, the bouncers at the clubs and the pimps!

I was incredulous. “You give gift bags to pimps!”  Images of Jonah and his withering shade plant came to mind—not Nineveh, Lord.

Stephanie, the founder of Switch didn’t miss a beat. “God loves them too.” 

And so he does. Difficult as it is for me to apply this act of love to a person who deserves a dish of justice, there is mercy. It’s good I am not God.

But then again, it’s good he loves me. And it’s good he continues to enlarge my heart.

Oh to comprehend the majesty of Immanuel—God with us—today. Here in this moment. All powerful. All lovely. All forgiving.

Merry Christmas, friends,

Marcia

PS— My article on sex trafficking here in the Upstate will be out in the January edition of the Journey Christian Newspaper—in free newsstands around the Upstate and in the online edition.