Crammed with Heaven: Are you someone who sees?

A monthly column in which Jenni Pretorius Hill shares stories of hope which bring Heaven’s perspective to Earth

The first 10 minutes of the movie Sound of Freedom are the worst. From the first frame you recognise what’s coming is the stuff of nightmares. Except none of the trauma is shown. Like all masterful storytellers, Alejandro Monteverde allows his viewers to fill in the gaps with their imaginations, which is effective, since all of us know something of sexual abuse — if it didn’t happen to us, we know a friend, a cousin, a colleague…

Imagining children being stolen and sold for sex by perverse and depraved human-beings, however, is a bridge too far for most of us – especially if we have children of our own. It’s a no-go-zone in our minds because to consider the possibility that something like that could happen to our child would relegate us to a place of perpetual paranoia and fear. But Monteverde goes there. If we are going to rally an outcry loud enough to destroy the business of trafficking children, someone must. 

For a slave, in the 1800s, crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky, spelled freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family lived on the free side of the river and while growing up, she encountered many such escaping slaves. While her family tended to them, she would hear the stories that eventually inspired one of the most influential novels ever written, and she credited her writing it to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a trigger for the American civil war. In her famous encounter with Abraham Lincoln, he was reported to having said: “So you’re the little lady who started this big war.” Harriet changed the world because she saw what others did not, and she was moved by compassion to act. I don’t think Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a work of literary genius, and as a writer, she is possibly less recognised than some of her contemporaries like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. Nevertheless, I cried all the way through reading it, and had I been born in the time of the Union, my fanciful imaginings would have dressed me as a man to cross the Mason-Dixon Line with gun in hand. 

Sound of Freedom might just be this century’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

Once, while visiting Istanbul, I met a woman who had been rescued from slavery. She was from the Philippines, and having responded to what she thought was a legitimate employment option as a nanny, she found herself enslaved by an imam in a middle Eastern country. Upon arrival at the mansion of this Muslim leader, she was placed under the “care” of a guard whose job it was to keep her from escape. Her passport was confiscated. For a year she slept on newspapers in a passageway. The children she looked after would lie about her to their mother, and then would take pleasure in her being beaten with a hair-dryer cable.

Escape was not a possibility; she had no money and no means to leave the country. Suicide felt like her only option, but not until she had hurt the ones who had hurt her. While she was preparing a table for dinner, she slipped a knife into her sleeve. She would stab the mother and then cut her own wrists. She told me she would have gone through with it had it not been for an audible voice, which spoke in the empty dining room: “Don’t do it. Be patient. I will rescue you.” She wasn’t a Christian, but she knew it was God speaking to her and she decided to wait.

Not long afterwards the family took her with them to Istanbul. They stayed in an expensive hotel, across from a park, where she would take the children to play. One morning a woman brushed passed her and slipped a note into her hand. The guard did not see the exchange. In the safety of her room, she read the note: “If you need help, meet me here tonight.” She knew this was the rescue she had been anticipating.

When the household was asleep, she slipped past the guard and went to the park. The woman was waiting for her. She took her to a safe house. The imam, on discovering her escape, reported her as a thief to Turkish authorities. The organisation, for which her rescuer worked, submitted photographic evidence of her abuse to the judge, and testimony of her slavery.

They were Christians who had dedicated their lives to finding, rehabilitating, and freeing slaves. Because of them, she heard the Gospel and gave her life to Jesus. Today, she is happily married and is a radiant witness to the liberating truth of a God who sees. 

When people turn a blind eye to injustice, God does not. In the story in the Old Testament, God finds Hagar, who had suffered abuse at the hands of her mistress, and reveals Himself as El Roi: the One who Sees. I can feel overwhelmed by stories like Sound of Freedom; but I draw hope from this aspect of God’s character. Nothing is hidden from His sight. And not only does He see, but He finds others who are willing to see also, and then He mobilises Heaven to their aid. 

Wherever we are in life, there are people in our sphere, who need to be seen. 

It’s a good place to start.  

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