A trip to Thailand changed everything for Noel Yeatts, president of World Help.
“I’ve heard it said that as many as 9 million men are going to Thailand every year for sex, and as you walk down the streets, it’s just bar after bar after bar. There’s bright lights and blaring music. And in some ways, for a moment, you feel like you’re in a big city in the States or on a vacation at a destination, but there’s one glaring difference. Everywhere you look, girls are being sold,” Yeatts tells the Charisma News podcast in “The Truth About Human Trafficking” series.
When she returned home, Yeatts wrestled through one of life’s most challenging questions: Where is God when evil strikes? Where is God in the darkest places?
What she realized shocked her.
“It wasn’t that God wasn’t there, it was that I didn’t want Him to be there,” Yeatts says. “When I speak about this issue, I tell people a lot that it’s almost like we, here in the States, we sanitize our faith to the point that it makes sense in our clean and comfortable world, you know, in the safety of our homes and churches. But our faith was meant for so much more.
“Where did we find Jesus, where was Jesus in the Bible? If He were walking the earth today, would He be in my world, or would He be in that world? Jesus was always found in the darkness,” Yeatts says.
This realization completely altered Yeatts’ way of thinking and how she approached her work and ministry.
Listen to the podcast below to hear what happened next.