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A Severe Mercy

By the time I stepped off the plane in India, I was spent. Nineteen hours of travel plus the prep frenzy to leave the country had done me in. Our team’s 4 a.m. arrival meant my first views of the city were shrouded in darkness; we checked into our hotel rooms to rest a few hours before the day’s itinerary kicked in.

If I had known what was ahead of me that morning, I would have stayed in bed. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone to India at all.

Up to that point, my life had been rather sheltered. I knew it, but I didn’t know the extent of it. I had constructed for myself a comfortable life, one that limited pain of any sort as much as possible. Anything that challenged my comfort was summarily dismissed, avoided, rejected.

But then I went to India, and God shredded my heart. Every­thing I had come to know went through the grinder and came out the other side in fragmented pieces. This is what I call The Shredding.

It was completely disorienting, to say the least. What I saw and the people I met there broke me—and like Humpty Dumpty, there was no putting this girl back together again. My life will never be the same. I know—it sounds cliché. Girl goes to India; India changes her life. It’s not cliché for me, however. It was more than a journey of self-discovery. This was a journey to understanding the very heart of God.

The Shredding

That two-hour rest the morning we arrived was fitful at best. Not the best way to start a ten-day trip through Western India. I was there for my freelance writing work; one of my clients was based in India, providing a permanent, secure family for girls at risk of being trafficked into the sex trade. I was asked to join the organization’s staff trip to see firsthand what I had been writing about. I jumped at the chance. Seeing new places is one of my favorite things, and going to India? How exciting! For weeks before, I imagined myself eating curry at every turn, being dazzled by beautiful saris, and meeting the seventy-five amazing girls whose lives had been rescued from destruction. It sounded utterly magical.

In many ways, it was a magical trip. Surreal may be a better word. This alternate reality I was dropped into took my own and turned it upside down and inside out.

Complete disorientation should have been listed as the first entry on the trip agenda. After that scant post-flight nap and a bite to eat, our team piled into the vehicles that would take us to one of the red-light districts. The frantic buzz of city traffic seemingly had a life of its own, enveloping our car into its flow. Rules of the road are less formal there, where pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, rickshaws, and vehicles move fluidly to fill up every inch of road. It was lovely and exhilarating and overly stimulating, especially in my travel-weary state.

As our driver sped us about, weaving in and out of the hubbub, I saw much that looked familiar, reminding me of my version of normal. There were lovely hotels and buildings, shopping centers, fancy restaurants, and luxury vehicles on the streets. The opulence, however, was juxtaposed with something very different from my normal: slum-level poverty. Between newly constructed high-rise buildings were rows upon rows of tarp dividers where a seemingly endless mass of people lived their lives. I strained my neck as we passed, trying to force my mind to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. This was real life for them. This was not normal. At least not for me.

More than 240 million people in India live on less than two dollars a day; another 939 million survive on two to ten dollars a day.1 Based on what I was seeing, I believed it. My normal, compared to theirs, suddenly looked more like extreme wealth, with all its food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, health care, education, and opportunity.

We drove deep into the city, its crowded, narrow streets packed with vendors selling everything from fresh fruits to sunglasses to fabric to phones. Soon the driver pulled to the side—it was time to get out, to become participants in the bustle.

Our team leader instructed the women to keep sunglasses and scarves on at all times and to stick close. The men were instructed to lead the way and bring up the rear and to keep an eye out for safety concerns (whatever that meant). Then we began walking. I figured we had a bit of a trek, because I assumed the red-light district would be far removed from the regular city life happening around us.

I was wrong. We turned a corner and everything changed. With every step the cacophony of the city faded, replaced by an eerie quiet that seemed odd for mid-morning. There were a few men loitering along the edges of the buildings, staring at us suspiciously. I was equally suspicious, and my heart began to race. What was this place? Then it hit me: this was it. This was the district. Just one block off Main Street. Just a block over from the vendors selling food to the people who worked downtown was this place of devastation. Did the vendors and customers know what happened to women and girls just around the corner from where they grabbed lunch or walked to meetings? My mind was racing with the ­absurdity of this place and its proximity to a regular life that the women and girls in the district would never know.

Walking through the neighborhood, I wanted to both take it all in and shove it all away. Extreme poverty, spiritual heaviness, staring eyes, excited children running around us—all my senses were engaged and my comfort zone was gone.

We visited with several long-time residents of the district. These women had somehow ended up there, either by birth or kidnapping, with no escape save death. Brothel owners and pimps use threats, violence, and abuse to keep their moneymakers in line. City officials turn blind eyes; some even deliver fleeing women back to their captors. There are no gates or locks to keep women inside the district—the system does it instead. The system is a spiritual stronghold, for I could feel its weight from the moment we entered. How could these women survive here, day in, day out? I begged God to help me give each woman respect through my attentive presence, even though I wanted to run. Deep breaths and prayer became my lifeline as thoughts screamed in my head: How can this be for real? How can this woman survive in such a damp, dungeon-like room? What’s that stench? Stop staring! Don’t you dare cry.

Our last visit was with a woman who warmly welcomed us to her one-room home situated in the lower level of a parking garage. The curtain that served as her front door did little to muffle the engine noise or stifle the vehicle fumes just beyond the fabric. She and our team leaders spoke for a few moments in Hindi; it seemed like small talk. It gave me time to look around and see her life. There was a bed, a few shelves with personal items, a chair, a table. But then she wanted all of our attention—she had something to show us. It was her prized possession: a hot plate. A hot plate. It allowed her to cook right there in her one-room home. I have never been that excited about my entire kitchen. But I couldn’t rejoice over her hot plate because all I could think about was what she faced every night, what she would face later that night. I was told men lined up at her curtained door—ten to twenty of them a night. On a good night, those who paid the pimp for sex with her would not beat her. This was her normal, everyday life.

It is estimated that millions of women and girls are enslaved in the sex trade in India alone.2 The few women I met made this real to me. In light of these women, representative of millions more, my normal wasn’t so normal. My normal looked way more like privilege, freedom, and honor. I felt ill over everything I had, everything these women did not. And the thoughts continued to rage at me: Compared to these women, I can do anything I want with my life. Am I taking advantage of that? What would these women do if they got to live how I live? Am I squandering the life of freedom I’ve been given? Am I using what I’ve been given to multiply freedom for others?

We walked out of the parking garage to the car that would whisk us away, back to the lives we were free to return to. We passed a group of women and children who had gathered to see the outsiders. One woman reached out and ran her hand down my sleeve. I turned and looked into her glassy eyes, giving a weak smile as I kept walking. She looked drugged, lost. What prompted her to reach out to me? What did she want? Whatever it was, I felt helpless. She was stuck in this district life; I would get to walk out and go on with mine. We got into our car, and I closed the door against the brokenness. I was glad to have a window seat so I could stare outside and gulp back tears. The massive ugly cry would have to wait.

The Question

For the entire drive back to the hotel, all the thoughts inside me could be summed up into one four-word question: What am I doing? The Question, as I now call it, screamed at me, inside me, touching on all aspects of how I live and view the world. It was actually the same question that had haunted me on and off over the years.

In the past, The Question had typically come at me in stealth as I went about the daily routine of my typical American life. It pounced most often when I was in an emotionally thin place—running low on rest or high on stress. One minute I would be bustling about, and then I would hear The Question, taunting me for how I was living and whether it mattered at all. What...