What talents, time, treasure, and experience can you share with someone that might give them a new song to sing?
Can you invest your treasure in a safe home that allows someone to get their foot on solid ground?
Can you mentor someone in homemaking skills or parenting and relational skills for the long term?
Can you connect our women to paid internships and classes that would allow them to explore different career fields and sing a new song with their life? We need safe, empowering, non-advertised places of employment that will mentor a woman to take and succeed in true leadership roles.
What opportunities and relationships can you connect healing women to that would build a healthy self-confidence? The dignity of being a part of something greater with opportunities for promotion? Opportunities that would make turning tricks never again look like a viable option in life?
In my time of exploring who I am becoming in my community, I have found a consistency in my gifts of organizational leadership and even found myself being a leader of leaders, and a mentor of mentors. How does that happen? People saw beyond the one chapter of my story and helped me connect and grow into my strengths for the sake of others. I have a new song I sing today, I sing it with and for God for HIS name’s sake. My whole life is a passionate “Thank You!” back to God. Even on my hardest days, I still show up and lean in. I still have consequences from my past, some that make traveling very difficult but it has not hindered my willingness to show up and share the good news of a resurrected life made available if only we reach out and help others to reach up!
Learning how to have healthy relationships with people, work, God, food and money have been hard and scary but they have been worth it because in showing up I truly get to live. Many of my gifts, experience, and dreams were God given but my healing allowed them to become truly God centered. I thank God for Refuge for Women for helping me to get to solid ground so I could live into the freedom that Christ already attained for me.
I hope my new song helps move people to not just break free but to live free. There’s so much more out there than just getting away from our pit of despair. Let’s not be afraid to live beyond our firm footing and into the new unrecognizable lives we are being given. May we lean into relationships in our own community and culture so others might also have the unconditional, authentic, love required to fearlessly dream up and sing a new song of praise with their own life.
Deanna Lynn, MASF
Author of Purchased: Leaving The Sex Trade and Integrated: Living Beyond the Sex Trade
