Laughter is a gift. I'll be the first to confess that I love all that is light-hearted, funny, innocent, comical, and endearingly sweet. But sometimes, I'm confronted with things at which I cannot laugh. Sometimes, when I look at life, the reality of who and what we, as humans, are...is enough to make me want to put my head in my hands and just cry.

It is impossible to spend any great length of time on earth without recognizing that humanity, even at his most exalted and in his finest form, is sick—emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically twisted, deformed, and warped on a fundamental and intrinsic level. In each of us, much of what was once the divine spark has been obliterated, stained, darkened…ruined. Man as he once was—flawless, beautiful, fearless, and perfect—has been transmuted into something which is insidiously sinister, grotesque…even horrific.

And because man is not what he once was, the world is now what it is. Each one of us is part of an international community in which there are literally millions of people affected by pressing issues…men, women, and children who are begging for our attention, pleading for solutions, praying that someone, somewhere, someday will have the decency and the humanness to merely care.

This past week I had the opportunity to preview a film made by a couple of young people who had the decency and the humanness to care about what is perhaps one of the more pressing and increasingly pervasive poisons in American society. It was a film called “Sex + Money: a global search for human worth"…and it dealt with the issue of sex slavery in America.

It was challenging—and horrifying—for its honesty. I left feeling like someone had punched me in the gut…it was that sick, panicked, stunned sensation you get when you hit the ground after free-falling 20 feet.

Why? Because there was a lot that I didn’t know. I didn’t know that literally tens of thousands of middle school and high school girls are recruited or kidnapped annually and forced into prostitution all over the United States. I didn’t know that only one in three of those girls forced into prostitution at 13 or 14 years of age have parents who actually care enough to even report them missing. I didn’t know that the average clients—those who devalue, destroy, humiliate, and abuse these young prostitutes by using them instead of rescuing them—are married men…middle-aged citizens with children—perhaps with teenage daughters around the ages of the girls they’re using and then throwing away. Men with average marriages, average families, average jobs, who go to average churches, and lead average Christian lives. Average pastors. Average deacons. Average businessmen. Who go home to their families at night with a smile pasted on their faces as though man were not the product of his thoughts, his actions, and his values…as though the largeness of one’s pretense could make up for the smallness of his character.

Another thing that came out was that there is a frightening amount of evidence indicating that pornography addiction is the single biggest commonality shared by those who perpetuate the sex slave trade by serving in the role of client. Perhaps we, the American people, should do more than lip service to the reality of the fact that where we allow our minds to go is where our bodies will later follow.

The kids who put together the movie had learned and grown much through the process, and you could see in their eyes that the dark reality of what they had learned in the course of putting the documentary together had changed them. There was no going back to what they had been.

One of the distinct realities of life is that when we are exposed to something which appalls us by the very tragedy of its existence—when we gaze with anguished fear into the black horror of some monstrous atrocity—we are faced at that moment with a decision. We can choose to turn our back, and walk away, and let our actions speak to the fact that we simply refuse to care…or we can choose to feel every ounce of the pain, to let our minds and our hearts be revulsed by what we nonetheless choose to embrace, to feel the full weight of the despair and the hopelessness and the brokenness—to understand that to act will also require that we be encompassed by the blackness and scarred by the monstrosity of the battle in which we are called to engage—to know all of this, and yet choose to move forward with determination and purpose, knowing that it is better to die fighting than to die without ever having entered the fight…we can do either of those things. But we can never again say that we were unaware…that we didn’t know. We may no longer hide behind the protective veil of ignorance, because in the moment of truth, the luxury of innocence is forever ripped away.

You could see in the eyes of each person there that night that the luxury of innocence had been ripped away. And you could see in the tears coursing down the faces of many of us that were there that night that the issues of sexual abuse, pornography addiction, and the resulting devaluation of human worth are all issues which strike very close to home. Statistically, one out of every four people in that room had been sexually abused, raped, or molested at some point in his or her lifetime. From the uncontrolled sobbing that was elicited from some who were there in response to the film, I’d say the statistics are about right.

It’s incredible to me—in the most ghastly sense of that word—that humanity can be so noble at times, and yet capable of perpetrating the most heinous acts of compassionless destruction. To choose deliberately to degrade someone sexually…to use them and then casually throw them away…is one of the greatest horrors one person can perpetrate against another. To reduce man, made in the image of God, to a mere object to be abused, mutilated, and destroyed—both personally, emotionally, physically, and psychologically—is appalling for the fact that it is done openly, shamelessly, and remorselessly on a daily basis. We live in a world where human souls by the millions are tortured and sacrificed upon an altar erected to the god of human pleasure. And the question we’re left to face is whether we care enough to lift a finger—whether we’re willing to take part in a war that might cost us everything…whether we can live with the shame of choosing to turn our backs and do nothing.