I volunteer with Advocates for Freedom, and every morning I receive a text with the names of three missing teenagers to pray for. Some of them have been gone only days, but some have been gone months, even years. The youngest has been eleven, but most are teenagers. And most are girls.

It breaks my heart to read about these teens each morning. Teens with names like Beautiful, Heaven, Miracle, Precious, Ella Celeste…and the names go on. These are names parents prayed over and thought about for a long time–they didn’t just slap a name on their baby. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Either a child ran away or the unthinkable happened and human trafficking is involved.

Until 2017, I knew little about human trafficking, but that all changed when a member of Advocates For Freedom spoke at my church in North Mississippi. As I listened to her talk about the horrors of human trafficking, I knew I had to write about it. At the time I had started working on the first book in my Memphis Cold Case Novels, Justice Delayed. In that book, I laid the groundwork for Justice Delivered, the story of a woman who escaped her captors and is working hard on building a new life. It is the most emotionally difficult book I’ve written.

The more I researched, the harder the book was to write. By this time I was receiving the daily list of teens to pray for and learning that many were runaways. Human traffickers often lurk at bus stops, and lure young girls who’ve run away from home. My prayer always is that the teens will find Jesus, and that there will be someone, like the women in Atlanta who offer coffee on cold winter nights to those who are caught up in the web of prostitution. More than one girl has been rescued from the streets by these dedicated women.

What’s so sad is that human trafficking is almost impossible to stamp out–it’s too profitable. In 2004, it was estimated human trafficking generated $150 billion dollars. In 2022, profits from modern slavery generated $245 billion a year.

What’s the answer? The only answer can be God. He’s the only one Who can change hearts, and that’s my prayer each morning for the dealers of human trafficking — that they will come to know Jesus as well and that their hearts are changed.

Please join with me in praying for victims of human trafficking. I can’t help find them, but I can pray for them. And pray for those who perpetrate it as well.