A Way in the Wilderness

See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19 (NIV)

          When I was born, my mom and my dad were not together, so my grandmother pretty much raised me until I was seven years old, and she got murdered. Then I went to live with my mom and my stepdad.

            I was not very welcome because I wasn’t from his blood. His family called me the bastard child. The men in my stepfamily chased me and tried to get me alone. When I told, no one believed me. They said I was a liar.

            The first time a guy pulled me out of my bedroom window, I escaped. My mom said I’d just dreamed it, go back to sleep. But when she saw my pillow thrown to the other side of the camper trailer where we lived, she believed me, but the chasing continued until I was fifteen. That’s when I got taken. One of my dad’s sisters saw me get kidnapped and didn’t do anything about it. She told everyone that I ran away, and so no one came looking for me. (I didn’t know that was why no one came until more than ten years later.)

            At every stop sign, the guys asked me, “Do you want to go back home?”

            “Please take me back,” I begged, but they just laughed at me. The place they took me, people were doing all kinds of dope. From the very first day, the guys told me if I tried to leave or if I told anyone, they’d kill me. “Do what you gotta do,” I told them. My life couldn’t be worth much. My own mother wasn’t even looking for me. She didn’t care. Why should I?

            The father of one of my kidnappers found out about it, and asked his son what he was doing. He said, “I’m not doing nothing. She’s my girlfriend.” The father took me back to my mom and my stepdad’s trailer and said, “Look, my son took your daughter. They’ve been going out…” The whole time his father is telling the lie his son told him, his son’s pressing a gun against my back, whispering, “I’ll kill your family, burn their trailer, but I’ll take you out first.”  My mom had all my stuff packed. I started crying and wouldn’t let go of her hand, but the guy yanked me back, and she let me go.

            For ten years I was held prisoner, beaten, drugged and sold.  I still can’t talk about most of it. I became a drug addict. (God has since set me free from addiction!) Four of my five children were born into that life. Most people walking around in the world don’t like to think that there are people like me enslaved in their own town. I don’t blame them. It’s too horrible to think about.

            But I am one of a precious few: I got out. It had to be God because of how many try to do the same thing I did, and they don’t make it. They get shot. They get killed. God gave me the opportunity to still be here. If it weren’t for him, I’d be dead.

            When God called me into ministry, he told me, “Take a good look at all the people out here in the darkness of this world: they’ve been kidnapped.”

            Only He can set us free.  Marisol Lozano