October 9, 2017 Show with Michele Rickett AND Kay Marshall Strom on “Women and Girls Globally Used by God Amid Deep Pain and Suffering”

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Women and Girls Used by God in the Least-Reached World

We are going to be talking about a very important issue today. It's an issue that I've never discussed on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do so. We have two guests today.

We have both Michelle Rickett, who is president and founder of She is Safe, and we also have Kay Marshall Strom, author, scriptwriter for TV and films, journalist for various magazines and newspaper op-eds, conference speaker and co-author with Michelle Rickett of Forgotten Girls, Stories of Hope and Courage.

Today we are going to be discussing women and girls globally used by God amid deep pain and suffering. We're also going to be announcing the She Soars Women Conference at the Mount Zion Baptist Church of Jonesboro, Georgia, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you both for the first time ever, Michelle Rickett and Kay Marshall Strom.

Thank you so much. It's great to have you both on and introducing to you also is my co-host the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And it's good to be on the air with you. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Michelle Rickett and Kay Marshall Strom, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

And first of all, Michelle, you are president and founder, as I already mentioned, of She is Safe. If you could please explain to our listeners exactly what She is Safe is. She is Safe.

Is a Christ-centered organization that works to prevent, rescue, and restore women and girls from abuse and slavery and then equip them to build whole new lives of freedom and faith for a stronger future for the next generation.

Of girls. And what specifically, when you say from slavery and so on, what specifically are some of the details involving that and also some of the.

Geographic areas where you're doing this? The abuse and slavery issue, I became aware of, my husband and I were in missionary service. We lived in East Africa and I learned about girl selling. It was mid 80s and so there wasn't much information around the cause of modern-day slavery or global human trafficking or injustices against women and girls.

And the more I began to look into it, the more I realized this was pervasive throughout the least reached world. Those places that do not have a strong gospel presence are much more likely, through their social norms, to abuse and sell women and girls.

So if you had a map in front of you that showed all the places least reached with the gospel, you could overlay that map with the map of trafficking in person. So human trafficking, of course, happens everywhere in the world to a greater or lesser degree, but those busiest human trafficking corridors in the world are mostly throughout Asia.

We're talking about North India, Nepal, Bangladesh, up into China. So of the 30 to 45 million slaves in the world today, about 80 are female, unless you're talking about sex slavery, and that 98 female.

So wherever in the world my husband and I went in our service, we saw this terrible evil perpetrated against women and girls. Christ has a much better plan for these girls. Let's see what we can do to work with the Indigenous Church and local Christian women who have transcended these abuses, so that we could actually do the smart work of preventing as many girls as possible from falling prey to these traffickers, and those that we could to rescue them out of red-light districts, brothel communities, garbage dumps, refugee camps, and get them into some kind of vocational training and introduce them to Christ, so that they could build a whole and beautiful life that God would love for them to have.

How Kay Marshall Strom Began Writing With Michele Rickett

And Kay Marshall Strom, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly, by the way. Strom, that's correct. Okay, how did you come to get to know Michelle, Michelle Rickett, and how did you both begin to work together on this book that we are discussing today, Forgotten Girls, Stories of Hope and Courage?

Well,.

Actually, I first started working with her husband on doing some editing on a book that he was writing. Then I went to a conference with Michelle, and we saw that, in so many ways, our hearts were bent the same way.

I had been wanting to write a book about the women and the girls in the least-reached areas, but the publishers I went with and the editors I had been working with said, oh, no one will read it. Nobody wants to hear that.

Nobody in America cares about people outside our own borders, and Michelle and I both knew that wasn't true. We both knew that people did care. They just didn't know what was happening, and they didn't know what they could do to help.

So, Forgotten Girls is actually the second book that we did together. The first one was Daughters of Hope, and we've done a lot of traveling together. We've done a lot of speaking together, and we have just had a great time learning and sharing with others.

Now, you.

Have quite an interesting background being a script writer for TV and films and a journalist. Did this begin before your life as a Christian, or when.

Did you develop these skills and also this career? No, I actually started writing... I have been in a Christian family. I was raised in a Christian family, and I have been a Christian for most of my life.

The interesting thing about working in TV and movies, I have discovered, I discovered quite a while ago, is that you can say things and sneak things in about faith and about what it means to be a true believer, and it's accepted surprisingly... a surprising amount of time, and so that's what I enjoy doing.

There are a lot of believers who are working in the film industry, and we miss that because of what the themes are in so many movies, but it is just a wonderful thing to see how people can be touched with the Gospel through popular movies and TV shows.

Forgotten Girls and the Stories That Reveal the Crisis

Yeah, great.

Well, the actual book that you both cooperated on, Forgotten Girls, Stories of Hope and Courage. Michelle, perhaps you could tell us what the catalyst was for writing this book to begin with, and tell us some of the stories about the women.

And girls in this book. The catalyst for me was, you know, I thought I prepared very well to work internationally, and I was shocked at the information I was gaining about the depth of abuse of women and girls.

You know, human trafficking is kind of the cause du jour out there in the world, but to the millions upon millions of girls who are enslaved, this is really just the last stop on a long series of abuses, and I felt that that story really needed to be told, and I was telling it as a speaker.

And when I was blessed to meet Kay and sharing some of the stories with her, and she said, well, this really should be in a book, and she counseled me. A book can go places that you cannot go. It will do so much and be an ambassador for what's on your heart.

So, and then, of course, the wonderful process of researching and writing a book. You learn so much. You have a lot of focus when you have two people who are focusing on the same issue. We learned some pretty staggering things.

One is there are 200 million girls missing on the face of the earth today. They should be walking the earth. They have been murdered simply for being girls through sex-selective abortion, mostly in India and China, and then for poor families who can't afford to find out the sex of the baby before it's born, they'll just wait until she is born, or bury this child alive.

This is the largest genocide in all of human history, become a driver of many social evils, including the trafficking of girls, because when there's a shortage of girls like this, people will pay money to get a girl in their family.

Right now, 52 million girls have been forced to marry as children. 14 million girls have been killed. So, all day long, but sometimes it's one girl. It's a very common story. In Forgotten Girls is the story of a girl named Nima.

She was five years old when she knew her life would be snuffed out if she stayed where she was. Her father was very poor. Her mother had run away and she said, which meant no protein for anyone. And in his frustration, he beat her and her little sister, who was three years old.

And so one night, they quietly waited for him to fall asleep. Sister put her hand over her mouth to a forest where they found a large tree that was hollowed out. And they dug it out and that became their little home.

And Nima would go into a nearby city and beg for food for her little sister and a little milk or steel if she had to. Her plan as a five-year-old was to live that way, but in the rainy season, bugs came out and began to eat her sister's legs and they swelled up.

So, Nima carried her sister back into the woman on the street to keep her anything that the woman wanted. That woman took her little sister. It's the last she ever saw in her way. And just shouting over her shoulder, you would be a burden, Nima.

All kinds of little jobs. She went to work in a hotel and eventually the owners rented her out to men who came. She was one broken-down woman. The process of healing had come to Christ and said, you know, what I want to do for the rest of my life is go to girls who are in this situation like I am and help them get free and have a different kind of life, the kinds of opportunities that I've had.

So, we could tell story actors from a dozen countries and interview scores of girls to get those we, Christians especially, we can sink our roots down deeply and understand how these things happen for girls and in that process learn some of the best, most strategic interventions and gain some great long-term partnerships along the.

Way. And why is it, now I'm assuming that that young lady that you were talking about, she fled with her sister because she was certain her father would murder.

Them? Is that what you meant by that? Yes, that's right. They were being beaten and she was very afraid that he was going to go too far one day and neither of.

Them would survive. Right. Now, why is it that parents in these countries view their daughters as more expendable than their sons? A godless view of women and.

Girls in the developing world. It's only where Christ goes that women and girls are listed and seen as image bearers. Little boys are, little girls as well. So, that's why the United States, though, you know, terrible things do happen in our country to a much lesser degree.

We are a very low risk. We work in some villages where every single girl who turns 13 is sold into them. So, this low opinion, this godless view of women and girls persists everywhere where Christ is not named.

And so, what it requires, intervention from God to begin to infuse into the lives of women, girls, and families, men and boys as well. And that's the hard work of she helped change a godless mindset into a God's eye view.

And it's happening. The exciting thing is we can go to families and let them know that God gave them their children, every boy, every girl, as a gift to their family to help build up their family and their community and their prosperity.

That was God's intention. So, we kind of connect the dots for them. One reason that you're poor is that you have been selling away your future. These girls would have had great contributions. So, if you'll cooperate with us now and just pledge to not sell your daughters, we're going to have a local team here of Christians who are going to help you generate income in a different way.

So, I would say the majority of families who succumb to the lure of traffickers, it's because, first of all, they already have this low opinion of girls that she's going to be a worthless burden on family, not going to bring others into the clan, she'll go on to somebody else's clan, and that she will be sickly, and that's because they underfeed her.

So, all of these marks against her mean that she's just not a good investment to be sold. So, it's self-perpetuating. If you have that low opinion and then you don't feed someone, they're more sickly and less valuable.

In the places that we work, it's where 90 of the world's poor. So, they're on the bare edges of the majority of the time, traffickers come as friends, as job recruiters. Hey, we'll give you more than you can make in a month.

They'll, you know, put down $50 for a girl and then promise that $50 will come every month as long as she survives and works. Family never sees her again. They're hoping the best. They really hope she'll meet someone and have a...

That's why it does require an intervention into these communities. So, seeking out those highest risk communities, making sure that we have teams placed there, and then support and train more local women that can care.

Christ’s View of Women, Caste, and Public Witness

And Kay, I'll let you answer the next question. Of course, Michelle, you can chime in afterwards and you could both feel free to interject whenever you'd like to. It might be helpful if you announce who you are when you do because it may be hard for our listeners to distinguish between the two of you.

But Kay, isn't it interesting hearing what Michelle just said, that wherever Christ is absent in the world, we see women and girls being treated with such barbaric behavior. And whereas the stereotype for leftists and feminists here in the United States and North America is that it's the Christian America, the stereotype of your average conservative Christian is that of perpetuating this kind of bigotry against women and having a low view of women, and yet we hear the facts about the situation globally where it is in a Christless area where these women and girls are being more likely to wind up as victims, very possibly be sold into sex slavery and other kinds of chattel slavery, and perhaps wind up dead.

This is quite a contradiction to what the leftists and feminists would tend to want to.

Promote, in this country at least. Yes, yes, that's true. And there are so many things that feed into this. The principles of life, the belief of our value, come from Christ, come from Scripture. And the details and the facts and the numbers are all important, but what really moves the heart is the story.

And let me just tell you a little bit more on Nima's story after what Michelle has told you. Nima, when the girls finished going through a recovery time in Nepal with the organization who had rescued them, they were placed back in a village with some sort of a trade that they can do.

And one of the things that Nima did is she was knitting hats, those Nepalese hats that were so popular and are popular now. So what Nima wanted to do was go back to her village, and they said, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't go back to where your family is. They'll sell you again. Don't go back. But Nima was absolutely insistent, and she did go back. She went back and her father said, don't you expect us to start paying for you, for food and for a home?

And she said, no, no, you don't have to do anything for me. She built her own little lean-to. She sat in front of that lean-to and knitted her hat, and then she took them to the market, and she earned more money selling those hats than her father ever did.

But when she came back, she said, I'm going to split the money with you, father, for all of the care you gave me when I was little. Wow. And every day, every day, she sat in front of her little lean-to, and she knitted those hats, and the women gathered around to see what she was doing because she was earning money.

She was worth something, and so she told them stories from the Bible as she knitted the hat, and the women learned these stories. They learned to knit, and it actually changed that whole village, and it was what Nima did that made the difference.

One of the other girls who had been in the recovery program with her was high caste, and she came to visit Nima, and everybody there said, no, no, no, you can't have a high caste person in here mixing with us.

That's not right, and the friend came. She stayed in Nima's lean-to with her, even ate food off of her plate, and people, the others just were in disbelief, but the girl said, in Christ, there is no caste.

We are the same in the view of God. Men are not better than us. High caste are not better than us. We are all the same, and again, it changed the whole attitude of that area. We know that Christ's view of women in the Bible days was different from what people believed at the time, and we see that same thing now, but what we need to do is let the world see it in action, see what really happens to individuals when they.

Change their thinking and follow Christ. Well, praise God. Michelle, I wanted to just piggyback off of that. I think, myself included, lots of Christian women, we know the truth. We know that Christ does lift women and opens up so many wonderful opportunities and, of course, renews our minds about what is possible with the help of Heaven, but often we hold back in the public square from really participating.

I was at the Luzon Congress, the last one, and I met a woman who works with the United Nations, and she was a believer, and she said, why don't you and your organization and others show up more often at the United Nations?

You know, it's as though Christian women are silent, except for maybe things that they're against. Couldn't we show up as a positive force? So, She is Safe has joined in. The International Day of the Girl is in October, this month, and She is Safe was founded in October, 15 years ago.

We joined with 193 nations to urge Christians to get out this month and start sharing the information with our young girls and with other women and men as well, and having a very visible, vocal opportunity to say, well, this is what Christ thinks of women and girls, and we are doing...

This last year, She is Safe was involved in prevention, rescue, restoration of over 80 ,000 individuals. So, that's a tremendous force of light that, of course, doesn't usually get recognition. I think we need to, as Kay said, continue doing the great work, but then let's show up in the public square and do prayer vigils at our city halls and go to the United Nations and to Washington, D .C. in force, and be a force.

Of light and good. I really, really agree with that. This is Kay speaking. I really agree with that, because so often, Chris, as you were saying, there's a bad image portrayed of Christian women, but the thing is, so often the ones who speak out are ones who are not speaking out with the love that we should have from Christ, and so we need to be brave.

We need to be willing to step out and share, and we need to share these stories so people can see them. That's so important. Thank you, Michelle. And before I go to a break,.

Michelle, I understand that you are a part of the She Soars, that's S-O-A-R-S, Women's Conference, which is going to be held Saturday, October 14th, this Saturday, at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Georgia.

Can you tell.

Us anything about this conference? Well, yes, I'm very excited to be involved, invited. I will be on platform and then also do a workshop. Patricia Holbrook, who is an Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist and a committed Christ follower, initiated this conference and started looking and seeking God for the right women to have on platform and do the workshops, and the more we got acquainted, she wrote an article in the AJC about She Is Faith and me.

She said, well, I know that you're supposed to be there. So we're talking about the fact that we are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, to show forth the praises of this wonderful One who has called us out of darkness and into His marvelous light, and help the average Christian woman look at ways that we can both capture the highs and lows of our journey with Christ and make those a sacrament, if you will, to His glory and also to reach out to women and girls who are in tough circumstances so that their light can shine, too, and they can transcend through Christ.

It's going to be a very exciting one-day women's conference here just south of Atlanta, and I believe there's still some room for registration. Great.

Well, I know that for a fact that we have some listeners in Georgia, and I would like to let you know, folks, that are especially the ladies, of course, that if you'd like to attend this Soaring, or She Soars, I should say, women's conference, the website you can go to is SoaringWithHim .com forward slash conference.

That's SoaringWithHim .com forward slash conference, and for more details specifically on the location of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Georgia, you can go to MZBC .org, MZBC for standing for Mount Zion Baptist Church, MZBC .org, and you can find out more details about exactly where they are located and other issues.

Well, we're going to our first break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for both of our guests, Michelle Rickett and Kay Marshall Strom, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA, and please only remain anonymous if you have a personal and private matter that you want to discuss.

So that's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're gonna be right back, God willing, with Michelle Rickett and Kay Marshall Strom right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Global Trafficking Corridors and the Need for Gospel Presence

Well, we are now back to our discussion with Michelle Rickett of She Is Safe and author Kay Marshall Strom. We are discussing the book Forgotten Girls, Stories of Hope and Courage, and also the general theme of women and girls globally being used by God amid deep pain and suffering.

If you'd like to join us with a question for Michelle and Kay, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. We have a listener from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Latane. In fact, I'll give you her full name because she is a Christian author.

She's also a guest that has been frequently interviewed on my program, and she is a convert from Mormonism into biblical Christianity and author of the highly acclaimed book, a classic book called The Mormon Mirage.

But Latane C. Scott asks, is there ministry, meaning your ministry, Kay and Michelle, is your ministry mainly outside of the United States? When you speak of border towns, are any of those contiguous to the United States, Mexico for instance?

We actually, from the founding of She is Safe, knew that we wanted to focus on those busiest human trafficking corridors, and so that puts us from Muslim West Africa throughout the Middle East and down into Sudan and then across Asia.

Those are the places that are underserved and least reached with the gospel. We still have that Great Commission focused for She is Safe to get the gospel to those who don't have the opportunity to hear it day by day and hopefully transform those.

Communities. And Kay, you sounded like you were going to say something. I was just going to say that although what Michelle says is absolutely correct, we do have the opportunity to step outside those boundaries and go to other countries, North Africa, Egypt, a lot of places like that.

And we see so many of the same problems and difficulties, but I can't say that any of the ones that are connected to the United States, such as Mexico, have not been in my realm at all. Well thank you, Letayne.

I do a lot of writing on the global family of God, and so I go to a lot of places that are outside of the specific environs of She is Safe, because we work with people on other areas too. But the same types of issues come up again and again and again.

The validity of women, why they are of value, how they work, who raise their families to become followers of Christ when they are first reached. And so it all fits together. And.

The Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co-host, has a question. Yes, you've mentioned about.

The various cultures in which you work. Do you do a lot of work in the realm of organized crime as well? In other words, I understand the culture where they have a very low opinion of women, but there's also organized crime that.

Uses women. So are you speaking about, or is she working with the local police.

Forces, or what do you mean by that? Well yeah, do you running, like I'm also, well I wanted to follow up the question with a question about your personal safety as well, because you're going to these areas.

I mean, let's face it, you're.

Invading Satan's territory. So the criminal element is what one of the things that has really grown human trafficking. Many of the cartels that used to focus on drugs are now focusing on the sale of girls, because you can sell a girl again and again where drugs are just sold once.

So they're very organized, very violent and sinister, and there is international interplay. And that's one reason that the United Nations, really spearheaded by the US, the Trafficking in Persons Report, which is a report card that comes out every year when these nations have decided to rate themselves on how well they are doing at combating the criminal element, as well as preventing abuse and slavery, and restoring victims' lives and gaining justice for them.

So it's all across the spectrum. It's like a massive puzzle, and every part has to do its part. But the, yes, the village that I mentioned to you in Nepal, where every girl has, as soon as she turns 13, she goes into one of the massive brothels of India.

In that brothel area, prostitution is legal, but only if one is 18 years or older. And yet the average age when a girl begins is 11 years old to be a sex slave there, and she will only survive seven years.

But the brothels themselves have 30 ,000 sex slaves. I mean, massive. We have nothing that compares to that in the United States. That's the backdrop, and of course, it's an economy. Criminals are involved in running all of that.

So we love to show up, as Christ would, as lovers of the people. So we work with the local Indian women who live in the brothel communities there. They have their churches there. They have great reputation, and they offer loving kindness to these girls in the red light district areas.

And often girls become sick very early. They have STDs. They are beaten. Some are burned. Some become pregnant. They become drug addicted and malnourished and just worthless to the brothel owner at a certain juncture.

And that's the opportunity for local Christian women there to show love, to help navigate these who are sick and wounded and their children, their children being born in these brothels. And we are known in the brothel community as that organization that has that safe place for little girls.

We last year brought four girls out from ages four to eight, and these girls lived in the same room where their mother was servicing men. So they sexualized the girls very early to keep them. But if something happens to their mom, it's our opportunity to lobby on behalf of these children and get them out.

So that's our particular way of showing up, as Christ would, in grace and in love with a helpful hand, rather than trying to cowboy in. It's because prostitution is legal there. We would be the lawbreakers if we tried to bust up a brothel of 30 ,000 people, which we couldn't anyway.

But we can be there as lovers of God and lovers of people. And that's our way in these refugee camps and garbage dump communities and red-light districts for the local lovers of Christ to do that wonderful work of helping people navigate to freedom.

Let me just add a quick word here, too. Even though we talk about the enlightenment of a country where our eyes are more focused on God, we need to be and identify ourselves as Christ-followers, not Americans, because American alone is not always a good thing to brag about.

I see that on the news every day.

Exactly right. We surely do. And I was once in a brothel in New Delhi, interviewing women there. And the brothel owner just stood there listening with his arms folded, listening to everything we said.