Her name is Butterfly.
It's somewhere around 9:30pm on a Saturday when I first meet her.
The warm, tropical air pulls strands of hair from my bobby-pinned updo as the red light district in Chiang Mai, Thailand, begins the process of coming alive for the night. All around me, club music pounds, the neon of a thousand bar signs illuminating crowds of women and men crowded around bar rails and spilling out into the streets. My skin turns from blue to green to pink as we walk through the lights, at every doorway hearing the high-pitched inflection of a one-size-fits-all invitation: "Come here, honey!"
I glance back at the group of Racer parents walking behind me, nervously twirling a plumeria between my fingers. My prayer is simple.
One person, Lord. Just bring me one person you want me to love.
And that's when I see her.
Tall, lanky and delicate, the first thing I notice are her eyes: lost under kohl black liner and painted thick with mascara. She and several other women saunter down from the bar where they linger and into the walkway, greeting our group like its some kind of high school reunion. Her embrace catches me totally off-guard, and I start laughing as her hands wrap around mine, pulling me to a wooden table and motioning for me to sit down.
"What's your name?" I ask her, all but shouting to be heard above the bass from the speakers. She leans in close, says something into my ear, and then begins flapping her hands like wings.
"Butterfly!"
"Butterfly? Your name is Butterfly?" I answer, and she nods enthusiastically.
I don't know the first thing about this woman, except that I love her immediately. She's up and down so fast that I almost lose track of her within the first 90 seconds of meeting her - standing, crowding more of us around the table, sitting again, gathering drink menus, passing menus out, and finally securing her bony hand on the top of my left leg. Aware that any time with her I want, I'll need to buy, I order a Coke, and tell her to order something as well.
I can't tell you we had any kind of good conversation; honestly, I barely understood five words that she said all night. But I love her. I immediately loved her, and I didn't even know why. Maybe it was the way her garbled, quiet words spilled out of her like bubbles in champagne, more musical than cohesive; or maybe it was the way she repeatedly insisted on clinking her glass with my bottle of Coke, giggling like a little girl each time.
And when the first man approached our table to draw her away, it was all I could do not to stand up and physically push him off .
Reaching over me to get to Butterfly, I watch as she lets him openly grope her, a smile too big stretching her thin lips. With a firm slap on her backside, he finally lets her go, and she drops back down into her seat next to me. Almost immediately, another guy comes up and repeats the exact same thing.
And another, and another, and another.
Thailand and I are at odds right now. Not all of it is entirely my fault, and most of it is actually God's. I'll explain.
Something I've never understood is "discernment". The dictionary defines discernment as "the ability to judge well".
Biblically, discernment is the ability to differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong.
Up until two weeks ago, I didn't have even a teaspoon of discernment. And that was fine by me. Frankly, it seemed like a sure-fire way to kill an otherwise good time. One of my sisters has a lot of God-given discernment, and when she brings that understanding into the spiritual realm, it profoundly changes situations.
I've known her to get physically ill when in places with Wiccan paraphernalia or when walking past certain Eastern trade stores at the mall. She's able to perceive the tiniest nuances in stories and people. No one can lie to her and succeed.
Last month, I asked God to give me discernment, and to grow my desire to see justice enacted for the oppressed.
Unlike some of his more tedious, lesson-first acquiesced answers, He went ahead and just gave me what I asked for.
So here I am, having gone from zero to so much sensitivity to what's wrong around me that I now cry basically every time the wind blows. And every time I watch a woman bought or sold, the amount of fire that builds up in me threatens to burn me from the inside out.
I look at women like Butterfly, women who have forgotten their real names, who they are and how to dream, and my mind feels heavy from the weight of her brokenness. Whatever evil brought her to the place of selling her body for quick cash stands in direct opposition to who she was created to be. A body is not a business, and she was created far too wonderfully to be purchased, used, and discarded.
To every other customer walking past her bar, she's just another middle-aged prostitute. But to me, she's a friend. And if I could somehow make her understand that when I look at her - when GOD looks at her - He sees past her hardened exterior of black makeup and five-inch stilettos, instead rejoicing in and cherishing everything in-between.
I notice the dark blue tattoos peeking out beneath her crop top. At 53, her faded ink has the water-colour-like effect of someone who has long ago aged with their art. I notice her sharp elbows and the contours of her exposed knee caps, limbs too bony to curl. I notice the photos on her cell phone - her daughter, my age, along with various clients and photos of her favourite flower.
Eventually, her attention is diverted elsewhere, but not before she asks to come have lunch with me at our ministry's coffee shoppe - a place where she could find a job and meet with our host about getting off the streets. I tell her we will find a time. One of my squad-mates chooses 4 o'clock the following day.
The next afternoon, we wait for almost an hour. She never shows up.
Galatians 8:9 says, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest, if we do not give up."
My job here isn't to save anyone. It isn't even to get a girl to know Jesus. It's to be the face and voice of love in a city where they are called disposable.
And I might not be the Christian missionary girl who has earth-shattering success at the end of the month here, but my goal isn't to have big numbers. My goal is to have one. Just one. And if I can love one person intentionally and with devotion, I'll have done what was asked of me.
Sometimes - most times - loving one person well is all it takes to change the world.