Who Prays for the "Worst of These"?

I got up at 3:45 this morning to watch the Leonid Meteor Shower. By all reports I'd read it was supposed to be awesome this year. And I'm sure it was . . . somewhere.

The sky was black and clear. The stars stood out magnificently. I've seen it darker and clearer and more breathtaking, but this was good and I was sure it would be a fine morning for viewing the meteors. I guess I should tell you now that after laying there for forty-five minutes at the proposed "perfect time" I saw exactly one (1) meteor whose flameout lasted about half a second. I must have been looking at the wrong sky. Maybe they meant that other sky over there.

At any rate, the Leonid meteor shower turned out to be a meteor drip for me. But the morning was not wasted. Far from it. As I lay there on my back staring at the stars a thought began to take shape in my mind. "There are so many of them," I thought. So many beyond counting. We see a few, but not even a countable number compared to how many there are. It was captivating, but it was the thought that God threw in next that actually caused my heart to skip a beat and me to catch my breath and hold it for a moment.

"As the stars, so are those whose lives, and bodies, and minds, and hearts are enslaved by pornography." I wasn't expecting that. At all. Suddenly my mind began a slow tumble back to the day we discovered the two grocery bags of magazines my stepfather kept in the attic, the Playboys we lifted from the rack at the corner drugstore across the street from Hardees where Lumpkin Rd. diverts from Cusseta Rd., to a bachelor party the year I left for college. I shook my head not wanting and not willing to return to the places I left behind when I came to the cross.

But God was unrelenting. "I want you here. I want you to recall faces you have forgotten, faces you will never know, faces about which you never cared. Dale, they are like the stars in the heavens. You have seen a few, but there are millions more. Millions more women and girls, boys and men trapped, enslaved, selling what they think they have to get what they think they want and coming away used, empty, and too often dead. And Dale, I want you to answer this question: who prays for these?"

Producers, publishers, printers, photographers, models, actors, owners, distributors, buyers, viewers: victims, everyone of them, of an unspeakable evil more repugnant to genteel folk than AIDS victims in our day. We pray for the persecuted, the sick, the "lost," the imprisoned, the unfortunate, the nation, the president, the school, the church, the potluck, the pastor, the people, and the parking lot, but who prays for these?

Who begs God to send into the filthiest of industries One who will bring hope, deliverance, and true, lifesaving love. We preach, and rightly so, against the dangers of pornography. We rave against the addiction. We filter the Internet. But who prays for the people? Who intercedes on their behalf, these ones who turn a glorious gift into a freak show for perverted minds and hearts? Who prays for them to find someone who genuinely cares for their souls? Who prays to be someone who genuinely cares for their souls?

I finally exhaled as the shower of divine concern subsided. I cried. And I prayed. And I cried some more as I tried to get my mind around how many people in our world (out of perhaps 9 billion people) might be caught in this wicked trap. How many children sold out by desperate parents who can't feed the rest any other way? How many fatherless boys seeking affirmation? How many girls just looking for love? How many women, frightened or fighting for some shred of self, selling themselves one photo set, one film, one view at a time? How many men loving and hating, lusting and loathing, not able to be free and whole? They are more than we can count. And we consider them, all of them, the "worst of these." We recoil at even the thought of what they do, what they have become.

Who will pray for them? Who will pray for the "worst of these," that by the mercy of God someone, somewhere, full of grace and truth, will intersect their lives and offer them Christ? Offer them hope? Offer them a way out and a way home?

I will. I've decided that every time I have to take an impure thought captive to Christ, every time Satan launches a stray image into my mind, every time my eyes are assaulted by unclean things, I will pray for those caught in the spider web of pornography. I will fight back on their behalf. I will not let them die alone, forgotten, unloved. Not everyone can do this. Not everyone should do this. Even the best intentions can be exploited by the evil one. But until God says otherwise, I'm going to pray that a very specific group of people hear a life changing testimony about the grace of God in Christ Jesus every time I think of them.

There are more of them than I can count or even imagine. But God is great. He loves them. He has asked, "Who will pray for these?" He must have a plan for them. I will pray. Perhaps you will too?