I’m thrilled to have my friend Bethany Hanke Hoang share this guest blog. Bethany is a young mom whose passion for justice, writing, speaking, and work with IJM is impacting many-including me. You too will be moved.
As my newborn daughter Zoe snoozed quietly on my chest, I stared at the laptop sitting just below her, balanced on my knees. I needed to finish writing an article that I’d intended to submit before Zoe was born. But now all I could think about was a woman named Ammani* with a newborn of her own.
Ammani was owned as a slave, forced to work grueling hours under a relentless sun. The slave owner paid no heed to the fact that she was pregnant. She worked under constant threat of violence from him. When it came time to deliver her baby, she gave birth on a concrete slab. She was not even permitted to clean her baby adequately before being forced back to work. She was given no access to a doctor.
Just before my own daughter Zoe was born, IJM found Ammani, her husband, her toddler, her brand-new days-old baby, and dozens of other slaves. IJM worked with the local police to infiltrate the slavery compound, arrest the slave owners, and bring these families into new lives of freedom and safety.
My baby lying on my chest above the laptop at my knees – my baby was born in freedom. I asked God to give me words to share about this baby in South Asia born into slavery. This baby who, like my own, would miraculously get to grow-up in freedom because the body of Christ responded to Jesus’ call to justice. This baby who would yet stand for millions more babies, children and entire families still in need of rescue today.
I’ve never been able wrap my mind around the staggeringly contrasting realities that define the world my family and I live in and the world that more than 30 million people live in as slaves, as property of other human beings; children and mothers and fathers whose bodies are owned, beaten, brutally worked, and discarded.
I can’t wrap my mind around these realities, but I can still take a step forward. Every single one of us has a step forward we can take every day – a step forward, deeper into relationship with our God who fully comprehends all that we cannot comprehend, our God who loves justice, our God who is fully able to move with power through even the smallest steps of faithfulness.
Today my children are 8 and 5 years old. I’ve been taking small steps to fight slavery in our world for well over a decade, but the wrestling, the questions of “what can I do? How do I teach my children? What can our family do together?” never get neatly solved. I’ve grown to believe that the questions themselves are integral to our obedience. Our willingness to wrestle and ask God newly each day to lead us – this too is part of the outworking of God’s own never-failing love for every part of his creation.
So, today, ask him.
Ask God to teach you. Ask God to show you what your children might be ready to see or hear or learn about the 30+ million people who are enslaved today.
Ask God what your family might be able to do together to learn more deeply of God’s own love for justice from his Word, to learn more deeply of the needs around you in your own neighborhood, to learn about needs in a far-off nation (pick a country to learn about as a family), to grow more deeply in being part of Jesus’ coming to make all things new. The IJM website has great ideas, videos, and resources, as do websites such as Ann Voskamp’s and A21.
When we ask these questions in relationship with God and in community with other believers, when we let these questions shape conversation with our children at every age and stage, even the asking itself breaks open the pathway to flourishing that God’s justice is blazing. Asking puts us in the arena, moves us into the journey. The Holy Spirit is at work in our honesty, our questions, our searching, even as he is at work in each small step of love and justice that he leads us to take.
Kristen Deede Johnson and I have been friends on this parenting journey as well as colleagues in the realms of teaching and writing about Jesus and justice. We joined forces over the past five years to author The Justice Calling out of our own wrestling with these questions (and with newborns in our laps and toddlers at our ankles!). It’s a book geared toward adults of all ages and not specifically toward parents, but it’s born out of our own journeys of moving more deeply into the whole story of Scripture and God’s call to join him in making right – bringing justice – to all that has gone so deeply wrong in this world, and to do so from the fullness of our lives and families.
We’d love for you to join us – to gather friends, other moms, families, parents – and wrestle together – ask God together – how we can join God’s work of justice, the beauty from ashes that God longs to reveal in this world.
Bethany Hanke Hoang was born and raised in Virginia and now calls the wintry tundra of Minneapolis “home” with her husband Anthony, their two children and a puppy. An author, speaker, and consultant, Bethany serves as Advisor of IJM’s Institute for Biblical Justice after having led the Institute as it’s founding director for more than a decade. Her forthcoming book, The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance (Baker), coauthored with Kristen Deede Johnson, will be available for purchase February 16, 2016. She has also published a devotional resource with IJM, Deepening the Soul for Justice (IVP, 2012). Bethany received her Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.
The Hoang Family’s “Very Official Soundtrack for Justice Passion” www.saragroves.com and www.joshgarrels.com
Patti says
Thank you so much for your important words and challenge about this sad and unbelievable situation.
Allison says
Beautifully spoken, Bethany! Thank you for always giving us good language, good questions, and good action steps. Counting the days till February 16!
Laurel says
Thank you, Bethany. I especially appreciate your insight about asking, and how the act of asking is itself entering into what God is doing. I am challenged to begin asking the question “when are my children ready to begin hearing about the 30 million who live in slavery today? “