003. Facing Humanity's Hidden Capacity for Evil ft. Gary Haugen

What does it take to do hard things for a long time without being broken by them? Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, a global organization that protects the poor from violence throughout the developing world. He joins John for a conversation about evil, the human capacity for violence, and why the people most serious about changing the world may be the ones most in need of spiritual formation.

AMA Opportunity:

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to connect@becomenew.com. One question per person; screenshot required.

About Gary Haugen:

Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, which has secured the release of nearly 50,000 people from violence and forced labor across more than 30 countries. Before founding IJM, he directed the United Nations' genocide investigation in Rwanda in 1994. He is the author of The Locust Effect and Good News About Injustice.

What this Conversation Explores:

• What Gary witnessed in Rwanda and what it revealed about the human capacity for evil and the reality of a fallen nature
• The four conditions that open ordinary people to violence, and what this means for how we understand sin and formation
• How IJM became a community of spiritual formation and what that looks like in an organization of 1,500 people
• The practice Gary calls "prayerless striving" and the daily rhythms IJM built to resist it
• What Dallas Willard's work on humility and careful reflection has meant for Gary's own formation

Resources Mentioned:

• The Locust Effect — Gary Haugen
• Good News About Injustice — Gary Haugen
• Renovation of the Heart — Dallas Willard
• Ordinary Men — Christopher Browning
• Explaining Hitler — Ron Rosenbaum
• International Justice Mission — ijm.org

About Formation:

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

It's almost like you're assigned to investigate 800,000 murders.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Right. 800,000 people were killed in about eight weeks' time. 100,000 people every seven days. Most of the massacres were done overwhelmingly by just common people the teacher or a clerk or a farmer. And then one day all the rules are off, and you can actually just kill that neighbor who is kind of annoying to you.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

What did that do to you and in you?

SPEAKER_01 0:30

One day I have to interview this little girl who's about eight years old. There is life mysteriously in her eyes and in her smile. I can just see the machete scars on her head.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

It seems like evil is taken as a kind of spooky, superstitious category that we have a hard time thinking about seriously.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

The reason we're having a nice day in Washington, D.C. right now, John, is because there's this really expensive criminal justice system that's restraining violence.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

We give ourselves credit for being way better than we actually are.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

In 2022, 500,000 Filipino children were sexually abused in front of a webcam for paying customers around the world in a single year.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

500,000. Just in the country of the Philippines.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Correct. I don't think that the work of justice is something that's going to be done quickly. So then how can we do something that's hard for a long time?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

You said it came to you one day, not another year of prayerless striving.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I could do this work for God, but I can do it without bothering to talk to God about it. And that seems fine until it's not. Oh wow. The followers of Jesus in that world could just bring an incandescent freedom from fear and an incandescent life-giving joy.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

So I'm here today with um not just my friend, although he is that too. Um the word hero can be thrown around loosely, and I don't use it at all to embarrass you, Gary, but uh the work that you and IJM are doing is it's just heroic work. It just is. Gary Haugen is the founder and the CEO of International Justice Mission. And uh it has brought many, many thousands of people uh out of the worst kind of darkness and uh into the light and into human existence and into the care of God. And I'm just one of a ton of people who are so grateful for you. So sorry. Um thank you for making this time available. Thanks for uh inviting me into the conversation, John. Yeah, well, um I I thought I would actually start today with uh uh what you wrote uh in the beginning of the locust effect. And uh I'll ask you to say a little bit about uh this episode. Yeah, and and we'll talk some about what IJM is doing. Uh but when you talk about kind of what began this journey for you, the first sentence in the book is it was my first massacre. My first massacre. And that's those are words that most of us would never have to think about as indicating what's going on in our world. Uh and how uh today's skulls are stacked neatly on shelves, but they were not, and and then you talk about your encounter with uh the Rwandan genocide. Yeah. And of course there'll be folks listening to us that were not around or might not know about that. So can we just start there? Could you talk a little bit about that event, what happened, how you got connected with that, and how that shaped what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Yeah. So I was uh federal prosecutor, a young federal prosecutor, 31 years old at the US Department of Justice in 1994, when the Rwandan genocide broke out. It was a genocide perpetrated by a majority ethnic group called the Hutus in Rwanda against a small ethnic group called the Tutsis. And um 800,000 people were killed in about eight weeks' time. So that is um, you know, about you know 100,000 people um every seven days murdered. So if you take all the deaths kind of in the current Gaza conflict and the U Ukraine uh conflict and all the civilian deaths out of that, uh that's not even a week's worth of the Rwandan genocide.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

And so um when that was over, the UN wanted to try to bring the leaders of the genocide to justice. Um but they but they don't have sort of a UN genocide investigation team hanging around on standby. Instead, they ask governments to contribute law enforcement, forensic, and prosecution uh resources to form a team. And so I was volunteered by the U.S. Department of Justice because I was one of the few lawyers, I think, of the Department of Justice who had ever lived in Africa, which I did in the mid-80s. I had worked with uh very small mass graves in the Philippines, uh, but then a mass grave would have been maybe um this was after the Marcos uh dictatorship years, a mass grave would have been maybe 10 or 15 people thrown in a common grave because they'd been murdered maybe by soldiers or something. Uh but in Rwanda you had the murder of about 800,000 people, mostly murdered by machetes and farm implements by their neighbors. And colonialism is kind of a fraught word, but the roots of the tensions kind of go back to there there is definitely a sense that the small Tutsi minority group, when the country of Rwanda was ruled by the Belgians, that the Tutsis were elevated to a role of privilege, uh the sort of the divide and conquer approach for colonial powers is to pick one group, privilege them, and have them rule over the rest. And so there was decades of Tutsi privilege and Hutu uh oppression, a sense of oppression underneath that that Tutsi minority. And so then when the Belgians have to go home at the end of colonialism in the uh 1950s and 1960s, this is all very recent for those of us older. Um prior to that, it's a it's a it's a colony. And um, but when you have majority rule introduced with the colonial power going home, that means the Hutus are now in charge. And so there was a lot of periodic violence against the the Tutsi minority. They eventually, the Tutsis, go off into refugee camps in Uganda and in Zaire, and which was the Congo at the time, and in Tanzania, but m mostly in Uganda. And so then what happens is those Tutsi uh refugees over time, a whole generation grows up there, and they begin to then agitate to return to Rwanda from which they had come, and they form uh an army to do that, and so then a sort of a civil war breaks out between the Tutsi exiles and the Hutu government in Rwanda. Um, then the UN steps in after a while to try to negotiate a uh a peace between them. The Hutu president uh he agrees to peace sharing, power sharing really with the Tutsi minority group and their army, but there's a group of Hutu radicals. You don't like the idea of sharing power with the Tutsis. And so then when the president of uh of Rwanda uh mysteriously dies in a plane crash, there is a power vacuum that opens up the door for those radical Hutu leaders to then carry out a plan they had made for quite some time to exterminate the Tutsis within the country. And so that is carried out, and that's what goes on for eight weeks, and 800,000 people are murdered, most of those murders taking place in um churches and schools and stadiums.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

In churches.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Yeah, because this is where Tutsis traditionally would go for sanctuary. When in the community, again, there would be some anti-uh Tutsi pogroms or violence, they would run to the churches for sanctuary and safety. And so when this started to ramp up in a super large scale, all the churches and cathedrals, um, and but then also stadiums and schools would fill up with the Tutsis. But instead of them getting any kind of protection, um these mobs of Hutu extremists were allowed to wade into them and just hack them all to death. So when it was all over with, I was given a list of about a hundred different mass graves and massacre sites where 800,000 people had been murdered by their neighbors. And it was the idea that we should begin to gather the evidence in these uh uh massacres and mass grave sites to begin to put together, okay, who led this effort. Um the reason the only reason that the whole massacre ended was because they ran out of people to kill, and because that Tutsi army in exile actually then took over the whole country. If you've seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, the genocide ends because the Tutsu army takes um control of Rwanda. The Hutu majority government and the Hutu extremists are pushed into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, uh, which has been destabilized ever since. Um and now the UN, when I'm there, arriving in the few weeks after the war in 1994, the idea is we'll try to figure out who has led this genocide. Uh so go massacre site after massacre site, look at the forensic evidence, but then also interview the survivors who could get it tell you a picture of uh about what happened. So I just personally just spent day after day wading through thousands and thousands of human corpses and then interviewing um men, women, and children who had somehow survived those massacres and getting their story from them and trying to match that testimony with the forensics to put together evidence that could go to an international criminal tribunal that eventually was convened in Arusha, Tanzania.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

I mean, it's just staggering. It it's almost like you're assigned to investigate 800,000 murders. Right. Yeah. And I I want to keep moving towards uh what you're doing now, but uh how do you do that project and and what did that do to you and in you? I mean, I I I can't imagine you know, for for most of us who live in the kind of place where I live or where you live, right, uh to see that I don't even have the right words for it, that side of humanity.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Life treated in that way.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

How did you how did you what did it do to you and how did you cope?

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Well, you know, it's it's an interesting question because this is how complex we are as humans. On the one hand, this is a professional task.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

So I have a job to do, and I feel like it's an important big job, and I'm 31 years old. Wow. I'm the director of the UN's genocide investigation in Rwanda, and I'm this relatively young, inexperienced person. So mostly I am feeling excited that I have been given such a big job. Yeah. So honestly, that's what I'm feeling. I'm also feeling really insecure that I don't know how to do this. Um, if you're working for the UN, you're supposed to even know how to speak French, and I faked that. So, like all this sort of imposter syndrome stuff is operating because of the professional task that that that I have. Um and so, like any other human, you're a little bit preoccupied with that. Yes, how do I not be a failure at this point?

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Did you have anybody that you could talk to confidentially to process all this stuff with?

SPEAKER_01 13:11

No.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

I had a carry it. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Yeah, and that was all also I will tell you that even afterwards, no one in those days was talking about trauma, secondary trauma.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Uh, which is what I'm experiencing because I literally am sorting through thousands of butchered corpses every day and interviewing survivors of these massacres, uh, most memorably little kids who would most of them I talked to had machete scars on their head or body, and they had been laying amongst the dead many times for days, uh, because the the killers would also come by and try to find who was still alive the next day or the following day. So some of them had to lay amongst the dead for days and then make their way out and then just live uh in the bush for some period of time. Um and I I've told this story many times because one of the ways it impacted me was the way mass violence and tragedy could take place in the world, and it would have a very sort of dehumanizing effect. Because I was sorting through literally thousands of these people have been butchered, and they were just usually in big heaps of human carnage, and so then it's just like sorting through garbage. But one day I have to interview this little girl who is about eight years old who has survived one of those massacres, and I can just see the machete scars on her head, and then it occurs to me that and she's a she's just beautiful, just this very beautiful child. And there is life mysteriously in her eyes and in her smile, and uh how precious she is is palpable. But I realize that she was just one of what would otherwise been a just pile in that huge carnage mountain over on the side of the building, and that I could have missed out on how precious every single one of those human beings that had been slaughtered if she were not in front of me. And anyway, it was an experience of um confronting the way in which large-scale massive horror can be perpetrated upon human beings. The world can pay no attention to it at all because I was one of those Americans who wouldn't even know where Rwanda is in 1994. Every week a hundred thousand of them could be murdered, and it wouldn't really affect my day. Yeah. And so it could be just this disembodied uh dehumanized tragedy, but then you encounter one of the human beings, and you realize, oh, this is a an a bearer of the image of God is of eternal significance, and yet my capacity also to reduce them to just a uh a gross abstraction. So that was very powerful. And also um you ended up all all interviewing um perpetrators of those massacres. Most of the massacres were done by overwhelmingly by just common people. The average person who one day was a teacher or a clerk or a storekeeper or a farmer, and then all and then one day all the rules are off, and you can actually go just kill that neighbor who is kind of annoying to you, or slaughter the guy as you because you always wanted his cows, you wanted his wife, and you wanted his beer, and today you can.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

And that's what most of the killing uh looked like, you know.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

So we have this newsletter and it cites uh Hannah Arnt's, you know, the banality of evil. She was looking at that after the Second World War and the trials of Eichmann and so, and there's controversies around that, that notion that she's kind of writing about there as I understand it, which is the capacity for great evil lies in ordinary people.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Oh, a thousand percent.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

I mean, I think I think most of us uh uh uh I would assume, I think most of us would assume I could never do that. I would never do that.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

And for any particular human being, maybe maybe you couldn't, but all genocide studies would suggest that That's not true. That is not true. The capacity for the average person to jump in on the killing of other people under certain circumstances is tremendous. There's this guy that wrote this book, Ordinary People, after World War II. Uh no, Ordinary Men. I think Browning is his last name. And there was a a group of it was the the the mobile um army unit in the German army that would go around and liquidate the ghettos, which means go to all the relatively small towns where the Jews had been put in ghettos, walk them out into the forest and shoot them all. You know, maybe that's a that maybe that's 1,200 or maybe that's 10,000 people. But you have a little army group that has to go do that. Now, these aren't the you know elite killer corps of the of the German populace, because those actually were turned into real soldiers who go fight uh, you know, against other soldiers, not people who just have the task of shooting uh civilians in the back of the head. So these this was a corps that was recruited out of your dentists and again your clerks and your average people who were not by any profile elite killers, but they're the ones who actually carry out the killing on a mass basis. And when they what was so unique is there was a group of uh psychologists who had an opportunity to interview them after the war as a unit. And what was manifest is number one, none of them would ever face physical punishment if they declined to do it. If they declined to do the killing, it meant they just had to do kitchen duty or something else. So why would all these ordinary men be willing to become mass murderers? It was after they do the interviews, clear that it was because they would face two consequences. One, they'd be made fun of by the other people. So that's just peer pressure. Secondly, they might they feared that their career would be compromised after the war if it was in their file that they had been not cooperative.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Wow. So those two consequences. Somebody might make fun of me and I might lose career opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

That's all it would take for um humans to step over a line to to uh kill others. And one of the things that's super important in Rwanda and all the genocide studies is that there is a there is something that does need to take place that these people are not humans like me. So as soon as we do that, um, and most of us are are are not around circumstances where we're feeling like like you're you, John, are not really another human, yeah, like me or my own. But in circumstances where I can start to feel that you are not like me and mine, uh, yeah, the humans can just uh slaughter each other.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

I I I this is fascinating. I want to get to IGM, I want to get to other happier things, but I just want to live here because I think I need to, I think we need to. I I think of this statement by Dallas Willard, who's impacted both of us very deeply, where he says the human condition is this. We want to do what's right, but we're prepared to do what's wrong if we if we think we need to. Yeah. And when I was uh studying psychology, there were all kinds of studies. Uh the Milgram experiments were quite famous around the time of the Eichmann trial, where it turns out subjects were willing to authorize what they thought, they were wrong, but what they thought was really physical torture of subjects when they were instructed to do so by a supposed authority. And the vast majority of people did it in horrendous ways. Um, when I was going to grad school, that was interpreted as basically kind of situationalism. Put people in a situation, and the situation determines what they'll do. There's a philosopher, Christian Miller, who has looked at those kind of experiments very thoroughly, and what he actually Says is no, there's always a small minority, but it's a small one that will not go along with it. And his interpretation of that actually is there are people whose character is sufficiently formed that they will not go along with evil, but it's a very small minority. And uh that was not talked about when I was studying that stuff. How do you think about that now? Yeah, no. How does that leave you thinking about people and thinking about us and what the Bible says about us? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

No, I that's why I think the the Bible to me does the best rendering of the mysteries of the human. And I think I've read most of the other renderings, and I still keep coming back to to this one. Um a fallen nature in a fallen world with a spiritual adversary.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

Imagine a fallen nature in a fallen world with a spiritual adversary.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Yeah. So here I am. I'm gonna try to go into the into the world and do life. And what the Bible teaches is I have a fallen nature. I have, number one, fears and disordered affections. So I'm scared of stuff, and then I'm being trained from day one on how to respond to the things that are scary. And I'm mostly being trained by what? My fallen nature, a fallen world, and a spiritual adversary. And so there's scary stuff all the time. So I'm trying to respond as best as possible. But then I have desires, but they're all disordered, right? I actually might want to run a 5K, but I actually want to donut. So how am I going to order those things? Right. Um, so that within a fallen nature of conflicting fears and desires, well, it's really hard to sort out. And I'm I have a sinful nature. That's the fallen nature. Okay, so that's hard enough. But then I'm in a fallen world which is operating with voices and authority and and uh structures that are also just being driven by those fears, disordered desires, and then actually exploitation and greed and all kinds of really malevant desires as well. And then on top of that, I'm trying to navigate this with a fallen world telling me wrong things and training me in wrong models of what I'm doing, and I have a fallen nature. And then, at least according to the scriptures and teachings of Jesus, there's a spiritual adversary that actually would is aggressively trying to uh lie to me, uh accuse me of things, undermine me so that I will respond in a destructive way. So to me, it's not surprising that humans have a tough time responding with uh virtue and why we desperately need a savior. And then when it comes to violence, you can see pretty clearly, because with the work of IJM, we've just spent thousands and thousands of hours with really violent people who murder, rape, assault, do the worst possible, enslave all those things. One of the things is you'll generally find all of them also have a side of their life where they have people that they love and are gentle with. Yes, yes. Yep. 100%. But they're but they're usually the violence comes out of fear. So something coming at me, I'm coming back. So that's fear or a desire. In order to get this thing I really want, I'm gonna I'm gonna use force because I have power. One source of power is physical force.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

So what opens us up to doing evil is fear or desire.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Or then um a greed, a sort of, I not only want that, but I am addicted to a thing that I'm pursuing. Then the final, the fourth thing that's is is different is an exaltation in the power of exerting force and violence. So there are definitely people in a genocide situation who are the ones having a good time. There's the ordinary one that gets drunk and uses alcohol maybe to get the courage to actually go kill a few people. Um, then they're the ones who, like for all eight weeks, are enjoying it and enjoying the torture of it, enjoying the pain of it. So um they're humans have a exhilar a capacity to experience exhilaration in the exertion of their power and a exhilaration, particularly in the exertion of violent power. That is where things feel extraordinarily evil. And what I've also seen is that if humans give themselves over to that exhilaration and that power, they have a hard time bringing themselves back. And that is where you do get this sense of an a force in human affairs that is evil, from which once you s deliver yourself, you're gonna have a hard time drawing yourself back.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

So ask one more question about that, and then we we will turn the corner.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

You gotta pull this conversation together, John.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

I uh uh actually I I I want to pause for a moment because I feel like the subject of evil is so important, we just don't talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:31

And uh I hate to place it on you, but because you have been where you've been and seen what you've seen, uh you have a kind of authority or experience base or something to speak to it that is just needed. Yeah. And here's part of why I say that. You're a Harvard guy, yeah, you're educated. Um uh there's a book by a journalist, Ron Rosenbaum, called Explaining Hitler.

unknown 27:55

Uh.

SPEAKER_02 27:55

And it features a picture of two-year-old Hitler on the cover. Yeah. And it's uh he talks about how that picture is controversial in Holocaust studies because when you look at it, you might be prompted to think of Hitler as a little child and feel sympathy for him. And is that an ethical emotion to prompt? Part of what he writes about, it's a fascinating book. Part of what he writes about is in talking with Holocaust scholars, most scholars in academic settings, he says, are very reluctant to use the word evil, even to describe Hitler. And Dallas Willard writes in um Renovation of the Heart about a media personality that convened a group of experts together to talk about evil. Uh, and he says it was in Aspen, Colorado, which he says the wrong place. If you're gonna talk about evil, you you know, you ought to find a different location. But the same thing. For the most part, people were either non-committal or uh they would not acknowledge that a thing like evil exists, and that somehow, um, particularly in places of higher education or folks who are academics, I was talking with a Stanford prof a few years ago who's really involved in positive psychology. And, you know, that's a fascinating field because they're looking at uh virtue uh and will define all these different virtues, and it's called positive because the negative side would be depression, neurosis, psychopathology, but not evil. So there's like no place. When I was asking, like, if you're talking about good character, where do you go to talk about bad character? Yeah. Didn't have a place when you travel in circles as you do sometimes, of folks who are involved in higher education, it seems like evil is taken as a kind of spooky, scary movie, superstitious category that we have a hard time thinking about seriously. How do you approach that? What do you make of that? How important is that?

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Yeah. Well, in some ways, is it just a matter of semantics? Then is it just there's something about the word evil that people don't like and it's triggering of this or that?

SPEAKER_02 30:18

Doctor evil becomes kind of a joke.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Or like in the Holocaust uh studies, that there's all kinds of ethical, whoa, be careful, uh it's because it's so fraught. But um what I would absolutely uh identify is that human beings have a tremendously powerful capacity to intentionally hurt other humans. All the violent suffering that IJM addresses is not the result of bad luck, bad weather, bad germs. It's the result of a human being intending to hurt another. Um and if you are acquainted with history at all, you will just see that human beings have a vast capacity to intend to hurt someone else, either because they are afraid or because they want something or they're addicted to something, or they actually just find exhilaration in it.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

So our so our I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

The way I want to finish though, in some ways, is Dallas was so great about also saying defining reality as what you run into when you're wrong. Yeah. And if you were to go into the world with the idea that there is not a significant capacity for evil, you would go into a world and find yourself running into that you are just wrong about that. And the only way you can sustain that, I think, is if you are just in a wood-paneled seminar room.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

If you actually go to the places where human beings are facing the struggles of what injustice and oppression and abuse are in the world, you would you would e quite easily uh let go of that notion.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

So I'll make this a statement, but it's really a question. Most of us are in kind of massive denial about our own capacity to do evil.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Yeah. Most of us, especially if you're talking about affluent Americans in the 21st century without any under much of a recognition of where most human beings have not been safe most of their existence. Women and girls have not been safe for thousands of years because they were subjected to the uh superior physical force of males for almost all their existence in all kinds of ways. Most people of a minority group in the presence of a dominant group were not going to be safe. Poor people were not going to be safe. The the the the scripture, one of the things that makes it so powerful, is there is just very real human stories of violence and evil from beginning to end, and a embodiment of God who himself at the end of the day is crucified on a cross publicly, brutally. And it's someone like the Apostle Paul would be someone who'd actually be promoting and holding the cloak for the stoning of somebody. And then I and then by conversion is turned to a person who is um uh utterly transformed. But it it's a transformation from one thing to to another. The Bible starts with the uh you know, the the fall and proceeds then to Cain's murder of Abel and just go all the way through to the cross. It's just a uh very clear and real narration of uh the human capacity.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

So I was just reading, like most people nowadays, if they're surveyed, would say if I was living in the South before the Civil War, I would never be a slave owner if they're white today. Yeah. But the reality is I have no idea that that's true. I give myself credit for moral superiority because I'm not facing the kind of inducements that people were back then to hold that position, and so I don't.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Yeah, I think it's a lovely thing to imagine about oneself, and that it may actually be true, but I don't think that expresses much rigorous acquaintance with the way the average human being actually behaved in that era.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

So solved all those things, moving towards a little bit of daylight. Uh you go through this uh uh life-altering experience. We'll probably come back to the word trauma because that's a real important word and is used now a lot more than it was 30 years ago. Uh you go through that. Um, talk us through uh the vision for international justice mission. How did that get started? How is that born in you? What was the story?

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah, so one of the things that happened when I was there in Rwanda was you could just see the extraordinary devastation, the singular devastation of violence in the human community. Because in Rwanda specifically, it's a very impoverished country for the most part. And there it had been the recipient of tremendous amount of poverty alleviation, international development efforts. Um but you could see that all those things were completely destroyed when the guys with machetes show up. So to me, this was like, oh, interesting that I know all kinds of organizations that are addressing the problems of hunger or disease or lack of education or homelessness, or you don't have fresh water, you don't have sanitation, you don't have a job opportunities. But who addresses the problem of the guys with machetes?

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

And particularly in the panoply of Christian organizations, Christian organizations addressing every need amongst the poor, except for the problem of violence against the poor. So that was like, oh, where is the where are the people of God in the midst of violence?

SPEAKER_02 36:28

And part of the point you make in the locust effect is we vastly underestimate most of us who live in the West uh the vulnerability to violence of people in extreme poverty.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Well, and it's also because for most of us who live uh in advanced economies, we are living in countries that have very expensive um criminal justice systems that are restraining uh the human impulse to violence. And they never work like they should, and so we think, well, we don't have the criminal justice system we should have. But they have no idea what it would be like to have a criminal justice system that Americans had 150 years ago, for instance. So the reason we're having a nice day in Washington, D.C. right now, John, is because there's this really expensive criminal justice system that's restraining violence. But it becomes the invisible oxygen that we're breathing every day because we don't generally see it or under see its operation.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

That's so fascinating. And that's part of why we give ourselves credit for being way better than we actually are.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Oh, a thousand percent. And because what happens in a genocide situation is circumstances arise where like all those normal gone.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Totally gone. Well, we don't want to fall back into that conversation, John. We're we're we're we're coming back. Let's go darker. Yeah. Um so I just saw that there was this singular problem that was afflicting the poor in these communities that was not amongst the traditional ministries, at least as they were arrayed in the 1990s uh globally. But what I also saw was, but there are Christian ministries and people uh trying to do good things amidst the violence. So, in fact, one of the ways that I was able to move the Rwanda genocide investigation along a lot faster because I was able to locate all the Christian leaders or ministry people who could allow me to get the trust of the local uh people to be able to tell their story. And so after that, I started talking to friends in Christian ministry around the world, one working in India who showed me that there were actually thousands of um let's take this out because I'm referencing India. Um I actually had some friends, for instance, operating in South Asia who were doing lovely work amongst the poor, but they had actually thousands of kids who were held in slavery in this community. Or I was down in uh Peru and went to a medical doctor who had in a small town had seen 50 cases of rape in five days from young girls coming through. Or in the Philippines, uh ministry working with street kids, uh, where they started to notice some of the teenage girls had been abducted into a brothel run by local police. So these were stories that after I had seen the violence in Rwanda, I'm seeing, oh, wherever Christians are working amongst the poor, there are people suffering tremendous violence, but there wasn't a um a Christian organization that was focused on that problem. Yeah. And so that's how International Justice Mission uh came into being.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

Okay. And um so tell us a little bit about uh what it has been doing, how it has been growing, uh what its effectiveness level has been like, because it's a remarkable story.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

Yeah. So we're moving into our third decade now. So it's sometimes helpful to think of IJM 1.0, IJM 2.0, IJM 3.0. IJM 1.0 was building these teams around the world in very poor communities who would just work cases, individual cases. So you might picture teams of Cambodian or Kenyan or Guatemalan lawyers, criminal investigators, and social workers, and they get those kids out of that brothel where they're being abused, or those kids that are in a brick factory of slavery, work with the authorities to get them out, work with the authorities to bring to justice whoever was doing that, get those survivors into aftercare and great casework, and then measure are you being effective in getting them out and getting to great aftercare and actually bringing the perpetrator to justice. So that's casework. So you do that for the first 10 years, and you end up doing tens of thousands of cases. But then you come to IJM 2.0, which starts to ask the question well, is this supposed to be the work of a Christian NGO to be reducing the violence in this community? No, it's the job of the local justice system, and all this stuff is against the law. Oh, but the justice system is just not uh very good at actually enforcing the law and providing services to survivors. So we spent the second decade experimenting, can we use all this experience that we have inside the justice system to strengthen it so it's doing what it's supposed to, enforcing the law and providing support and services to survivors. And then we wondered, could you measure that the justice system is getting stronger in its performance? And you could you measure that the violence and slavery was being reduced? So we did this in nine experiments over a 15-year period of time. It took us about 15 years. And sure enough, in all nine of those experiments in Philippines, Cambodia, Uganda, India, the Dominican Republic, nine out of nine times outside evaluators were able to find a 50 to 85 percent reduction in the forms of violence or slavery that our program was 50 to 80 percent. 50 to 85 percent. Which at the Department of Justice, when I was there, if you could reduce crime by like 5%, you were a total hero.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

But these were situations, imagine what if the law was never enforced? How much crime would you have? A lot. Let's say you get some reasonable law enforcement, most of it then goes away. And so that's what we found was actually possible. Because the main problem was that people thought these broken, corrupt justice systems could never be made to work. But what if they could? So that's what we proved in IJM 2.0 was no, there's actually a methodology here for strengthening an underperforming justice system, and if you do that, you can radically reduce the amount of crime against the poor. So now we're in IJM 3.0. We've identified 46 more jurisdictions around the world, which have all these three ingredients. They have high poverty, high violence or slavery, but thirdly, they also have a justice system that we think, if strengthened, could reduce slavery or violence by between 50 or 85 percent. So we're now embarked on this journey over the next about eight years where we're going to, we think, see reductions of between 50 and 85 percent of the slavery and violence in these 46 communities. And there's 500 million people living in poverty in these 46 jurisdictions. So that's what IJM's teams around the world are doing in partnership with justice systems all around the world.

SPEAKER_02 43:44

Um now that you're able to operate at a systemic level, yeah. I know it's been true in the past. Do you have a sense of how many people have been released from being trafficked through IJM?

SPEAKER_01 43:59

Yeah. As of now, IJM has uh seen the release of about 480,000 people.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

One of the largest projects was what was in South Asia, in one of the jurisdictions where we saw uh more than 300,000 people move from being in bonded slavery to actually operating in in freedom. And this is from, again, outside evaluators, because it was a situation where a third of all manual laborers in this state um were held in forced labor. And so over an eight-year period of time, um, that was reduced by more than 80 percent. So we've seen um hundreds of thousands of individual people uh over these three decades move from places of abuse and violence uh to freedom. And we think at the moment we'll be on uh uh pace for seeing about a uh an additional million more by the year 2030 individuals.

SPEAKER_02 45:05

Um years ago I went to the Philippines to see what I Jam was doing, and I had no idea until I was there how complicated it was. Yeah. And partly it involved a lot of girls, too young to even be young women, who uh had been trafficked sexually. And the picture I always had in my mind was oh, somebody's got them like at gunpoint or knife point, and so when you come to get them released, you're the hero and it's all wonderful. And it was so much more complicated than that because uh their captors uh of course had a certain kind of relationship with them and would tell them that they were protecting them from law enforcement, and horrible things would happen to them if they were ever outside of that protection and give them food and sew. So it was a much more uh ambivalent, ambiguous situation to be able to release them and have them kind of one step at a time grow towards freedom and a wholeness. And it was it was unspeakably heartbreaking, but way more complicated than I had any idea.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

Oh, yeah. Well, anybody, you know, we think of maybe child abuse as a pretty straightforward thing, like child being abused should be stopped. But anybody who's gone with child protective services to remove a child from a home where they're being abused, to think that that's a straightforward uh matter. No, it's enormously uh complicated and needs very, very uh tender and sensitive uh care. But somebody's got to go into that mess, right? And that's what I so admire about our teams is their willingness to take in, take on all the sort of untidiness and messiness of that. Um and now in the Philippines in particular, imagine this, John. Uh, this uh sexual abuse of children has moved online. So um now children are sexually abused in front of a webcam for paying customers around the world who direct live stream the abuse of the child while it's happening. And in one year we uh uh did a study in 2022 in which it was manifest that 500,000 Filipino children were sexually abused in front of a webcam for paying customers around the world in a single year.

SPEAKER_02 47:38

500,000 just in the country of the Philippines. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 47:43

And this has been an exploding form of sexual abuse. But you can imagine how messy that is, because almost all of those cases are ones in which somebody is in a place of care of a child and is exploiting it of trusted care, and they're exploiting it uh for the most sort of horrific commercial purposes. So again, um if if we are under this mistaken understanding that there isn't a tremendous and pervasive capacity for human beings to hurt one another, um I I just don't think we've gotten out into the world enough.

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Yeah. No, and uh I don't even have the right language for this right now, but it's somehow there's a kind of blindness there that is is very pervasive in the world that I live in, um, where it's almost like we have to try to get ourselves it's like I know the Bible says that uh the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things, but I don't really believe that about my heart. And I guess I'm supposed to try to push myself to believe it, or or I think the Bible, they were uh more severe in those days, they were more punitive in those days, and our day were more humane and enlightened. And uh so I have a hard time believing in the truth of what's there, but I don't think you have a hard time believing in that truth.

SPEAKER_01 49:12

No, I I I I don't. And I but I sympathize those with those though who are are sitting there thinking, I know, I'm quite sure I would never do that. Yeah, because I think that that's that's probably true for for very many, and it's it's not a a problem or an issue for them.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

Aaron Powell No, and I and I I think about is it in Thessalonians or someplace where the Bible talks about the one who restrains the evil in the world?

SPEAKER_01 49:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:40

And uh uh that's the system that you're talking about. It just mirrors that language so much.

SPEAKER_01 49:45

I just if folks would I think just read the the Bible with an eye for how much violence is there in the Bible. Yeah. I think that was that might just help to not say that, oh yeah, personally violence wasn't a problem for me, but now it is today. No, maybe for for lots of people today, violence is not the pressing problem that they're tempted to do it or that they're suffering from it. But what they do need to understand is that there are millions upon millions of people, millions today that are enduring being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, and robbed. That is true. And I do think as we are meant to take on God's heart for what is happening in the world, the God that we believe in is in each one of those places today where each of those individuals is being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, and robbed. So there's just always something about our God we're not going to really understand or connect with as long as we can't bear his heart for what it's like to be in these realities. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:06

No, and I I was just listening a couple days ago to an old podcast where Dallas was speaking to a group and he was talking about a thief. And he said it's terribly to understand a thief is not somebody who steals irregularly, a thief is a person who would steal regularly. Yeah. If the occasion and the opportunity were right. Yeah. Um so now uh what I want to kind of turn to is IJM is it's going through 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. Uh uh the weight and the pressure and the um burden of seeing what you see, doing what you do, um, facing the danger that's there. And I know you know the cost that that has involved uh for some folks is so immense. And you told me some time ago about you got kind of to the end of the year, we're trying to figure out what does God want next. And uh the answer that came back was he did not want another year of a certain kind of striving. Yeah. Say a bit about that and then uh about not just what's the external mission of IJM. Um, what most people just would not know is the thought and effort that goes into um the kind of formative community that IJM is, and I think that's part of what I admire about it as much as the external piece. So say a bit about that journey.

SPEAKER_01 52:38

Yeah. Well, the the the first thing you understand, I think, when you engage a struggle against violence or the or seeking justice, let's call it that, is that it's gonna take a long time. And that it's gonna be really, really hard. And so then the question is, how can I do a hard thing for a long time? And how can I not myself be contorted by it and broken by it? Because I don't think Jesus calls us into a ministry to destroy us, and I don't think that the work of justice is something that's going to be done quickly. So then how can we do something that's hard for a long time? Because justice is definitely a marathon and and not a sprint. And so early on, it uh IJM began to see that, oh, we need to constitute ourselves as a community of Christian spiritual formation if we're going to pursue this the way I think Jesus would have us. Now, those were words that we wouldn't have used at the very beginning, because as you alluded to, it was mostly just a confrontation with just obvious weakness. The first was, oh, this is scary because we're dealing with violence and we're going to get hurt and some other and we're going to get other people hurt. So we just started to pray as a matter of desperation for God's help. So that was a good starting point. But then we could see the way that we could get so busy. I saw the way I could get so busy doing this justice work that that that's where this phrase prayerless striving emerged.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

That that was what yeah, you said it came to you one day, not another year of prayerless striving.

SPEAKER_01 54:31

Right. Yeah. Because I could see, well, I could do this work for God or this mission that's so worthy, but I can do it without bothering to talk to God about it. And that seems fine until it's not. And then you're way down the road. So um that's where we instituted the practice every day of just stopping what we're doing at 11 o'clock to pray. And I think when we started this, and it was in the third year of IJM, there was probably, I don't know, 11 of us or something. So International Justice Mission has about 1,500 people now, but at the beginning it was like year three, it's like 11 people. And it's like every day we're gonna stump.

SPEAKER_02 55:10

1,500 people all all around the world.

SPEAKER_01 55:12

Correct. Yeah. Um, but in that in year three, it was like, no, there's only 11 of us, so let's stop what we're doing every day at 11 and let's um uh just ask uh God for the things that we need and give him thanks for uh what he's done for us. And it was every day pulling away from the idol of the work, the busyness, because that's what we could start the idol, of course, being this is where we think the real power is. If I just do more of the working. Well, let's step away from that and recover our our sanity and realize, oh, no, no, the thing that's most important is the God of justice. And let's just thank him for his kindness to us and then ask him for the help. And let's do that every single day. And then a few years later, we figured out, oh, I think God wants to pour out more of his power and presence with us, but we're not ready to receive it. So let's start every day with no work, but just being silent in his presence. So everybody at IJM starts out the day with 30 minutes of stillness, solitude, and silence to spiritually prepare for the day. Then we work for two hours and then stop what we're doing again to pray together. And then once uh every quarter, we have a day for a prayer retreat where we step away from the work. So these are the rhythms of spiritual practices that are so simple, but they are the things that keep us from that prayerless striving more than anything else.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

How did people respond to that? Because after we started talking about this, because we've talked a fair bit about how do um communities, organizations get intentional about doing spiritual formation. And I was working at a church at the time, and uh so we decided to do the same thing, but the resistance to stopping and being still and uh prayer with the staff was very strong because people felt like, well, that's gonna keep me from getting my work done, and I have to get my work done. And this is at a church, and it was not at all, the response is not at all like, oh, this is great. I get to have some time to set aside and to be still, and for the most part, there was a lot of resistance. What was it like for you guys?

SPEAKER_01 57:29

Well, this is the benefit of starting with only 11 people. Yeah. Um, and we're like, well, let's try it. And then we tried it for six months, and we're like, oh yeah, this is this is good. But it is still every day hard. Every day, uh whenever I lead 11 o'clock prayer, I say, I hope everyone got some stillness today. Because it'll remind us that no, it's not actually easy to just step into that. It's annoying as possible, especially you're just getting ready to get your work done. You maybe have gotten your life arranged uh for that day to like get really busy and into it. And like the first thing you gotta do is just like sit in stillness. But then for most of us, like, yeah, but what about all the unexamined stuff going on inside? And what about thinking about your the the meetings or the diff things that are in front of you that might be difficult? Why not why not take a moment uh like Willard with Dallas would say that you know, rarely are the things that disappoint him most about his behavior the product of careful reflection?

SPEAKER_02 58:31

So why not say that say that one more time?

SPEAKER_01 58:33

Rarely are the rarely are the things that disappoint us most about our reactions or behaviors, rarely are they the result of careful reflection. And I found that true about myself too. Like if I look back at the day or the week or the like, wow, what an ass I was right over. Can you say it on the show?

SPEAKER_02 58:52

Uh what about I almost used the S word a few minutes ago, so I think it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 58:58

What about uh why was I such a jerk without uh um and but wow, what if I had just some time to think about that and and think about it in the presence of Jesus? Because it's just rarely the case that I will have acted in a way that's very disappointing. And it is it has followed me sitting still with Jesus with the thing and figuring out the best way to respond. It's always just in the moment, it's the habits, it's the reaction. So um, but but that half hour of stillness every day is for most of us very hard to reach for. The stopping my work at 11 when I'm just I just started to get productive by 11. I mean, I'm starting to be in the flow, I'm starting to hum. I'm starting to um and so yes, there's a reason these are called spiritual disciplines, but I think absolutely that what keeps the people at IJM and keeps them working sustainably with joy is these spiritual practices. And over time it's also self-selecting in a way, right? If it's like, yeah, it's just a little too much prayer and Jesus for me, then it's like, then fine, this is just not the place for for you.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:24

Go work at a church.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:25

But but well, most people at IGM would definitely say that the thing they treasure most at IGM are the practices of formation.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:40

Well, I remember uh you're saying to me one time, most folks that are on staff at IGM would say that's a more spiritually formative community than their church is. And then you said, Well, of course, because I've got them for 40 hours a week. So they're gonna be shaped. Uh just the number of hours that they're present and being shaped for better or for worse is gonna be much higher there.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

And because of the authenticity that emerges if you spend 40, 60 hours a week with somebody. In other words, I feel like a lot one of the things that's hard about church life is you can scrub up for an hour and a half of being present at church, right? And you can say all the Jesus things and so forth. But you can't say all the Jesus things and then work 40 plus hours with someone because the real stuff is gonna emerge. Yeah. And it's very humbling to pursue the discipleship of Jesus, the way marriage is humbling for most of us, right? We're like, oh, you get to see like the real Gary all day, what that's like. Not the Gary that goes away and gets tidied up, then I'll represent myself.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:52

People will periodically say to my wife, it must be just wonderful to be married to John. And you know my wife, she used to be on the board, you know, she will always throw up in her mouth a little bit and then have some very generous and kind, merciful thing to say, no doubt, John.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So actually, I think that's why people at IJM can experience spiritual formation very powerfully, because there's a level of authenticity with each other about it that is uh manifest or required in a way because your life is real with each other, and we're under stressful, difficult circumstances, and we need to be different than what we are. Because any work of justice is, first of all, it's going to require a supernatural passion to care about people who are in really faraway, unfamiliar circumstances, and I'm more focused easily on myself. So, how do I sustain that passion? How do I actually even believe it's possible to change? Once I even believe it, how do I find the courage to take it on when it's gonna be hard? Then, even if I find the courage, how do I sustain it when I realize, oh, this is gonna take a long time? So that's perseverance, and then it turns out it's gonna be with people, so it's gonna be messy, so I'm gonna need love, and then it's gonna be complex, and so I'm gonna need wisdom. See, these are all spiritual qualities which are just needed if you're actually gonna pursue this work of justice, and so our life as a community of spiritual formation says, yeah, we need this, and let's help each other pursue it together. And the number one thing in many respects that allows us to do this, we say about IJM that the work of protecting the poor from violence is God's weight, our work done Jesus' way. And the way to think about that is, first of all, the first thing is you gotta throw off the weight of this. Yeah, because that will just become crushing. Yes, you've got your work to do, but to take on the weight of it will just uh first of all, it's just wrong because it God can only be the one accountable for these outcomes. You can't save that person or make that change that in government or whatever it is. So God's gonna have to bear the w weight of that. You can do your little bit of the work, but then let's do it Jesus' way, which for us is staying close to the Father and loving each other. And so that sort of is the orientation. It begins every day at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

God's weight, my work, Jesus' way. Right. Yeah, I love that. Let me ask you a personal question along those lines. When I decided that I was gonna become a pastor rather than something else, I thought, well, at least one bonus is I'll get spiritual maturity thrown in, you know, because I'm like working with the Bible and all this kind of stuff. And then of course I realized, no, no, no, it's still me. Yeah, like I'm still bringing me into this process. So the fact that I have a job that looks like a spiritual job is nothing from the inside what I thought it would be like from the outside. Yeah. Um, with IJM, it's been incredibly effective. And with that will go recognition and uh uh applause from people and uh a sense of being a successful leader and all that. How do you navigate all of that? How how how does that impact you? Um, what are the parts of that that can be tempting? How do you deal with the success that IJM has had?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:28

Well, I think most fundamentally uh because I was there, I actually know what I personally contributed to that and what the actual the outcome is. So the outcome is is tremendous, but rationally I actually remember what it is that I contributed to that. And and th there's just no uh um equivalence. It it it becomes funny to think about. Now I take Joy, and I think I did some things well, and so on and so forth, but it feels personally like a very out-of-body experience, what God is. That's how I experience it. And we're actually studying humility this year as our spiritual grace. And it's the every year we take on a spiritual grace to study. And we've been doing this for a little more than 25 years, and this is the third time that we've studied humility. The first time we did it, we finished there, we said we should study this again, and then uh and now we're doing it uh a third time. But and this is so much informed by Dallas Willard's, I think, understanding of humility is it's just about seeing reality clearly. Yeah, it's about seeing God, yourself, and other people as they actually are. And so um I I I think we are, and and I think that as the Holy Spirit allows me just to see what has happened, as I just said, I think I'm grateful for the ways I feel like God has used my gifts or abilities in uh in moments in that. But to look at that and then look at what has happened, the causal connection between those two things is is is fantastical. So I find myself in a posture of enormous gratitude and then stewardship was like, wow, for some reason God allowed me in on this thing he just wanted to do. And so now how can I be a good steward of that? It's also important to have your family around you that is not, you know, not really impressed by you. No uh uh yeah, not uh in any illusion about how regular you are, and to have people and leaders around you who um are not enthralled by anything uh who they like you and they enjoy you, but um not enthralled.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:59

So if Jan were here at the table and I were to ask Jan, Jan, if Gary were to get off track in life in some way, um what's the most likely route? Where would he most likely go off on a wrong path? What what would what would what would Jan's response be?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:18

I think it would be um sort of a forcefulness about being right, um a sort of presumptuous pride, maybe, uh, about things. Um that yeah, that those would probably be the the two things because I can really think I'm right. Yeah. And I can bring that very forcefully. Uh and then I can just obliviously presume I'm better or uh or just presume uh that everything that's and this is again Dallas is like there should be we we we should let go of all pretending, presuming and pushing.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:04

Don't push, don't pretend, don't yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

And it's the it's the presuming that would come.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:08

But I could easily we see where that would be kind of your shadow mission and the shadow side of the gift, strengths, and passions that you would need to do what you've done.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:18

No, I think that is right because um I do feel like there's that the strength and uh and weakness just is always uh uh the flip side of the other. So if you're gonna do something new that I jam with something new, you needed sort of the courage of that conviction and not be put off by the first, third, or thousandth person that told you, oh, that'll never work, right? And it's like I think yeah, well. So that can be a strength, but like all these things uh w uh without uh proper moderation by wisdom.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:52

We're likely to be tempted in the areas of our strength when they just get misguided. Yeah, I think that is right. I want to come back to the trauma word for a moment. Uh our newsletter talks about uh Bilo Center's uh Center for Christian Thought has a little essay on um spiritual care after violence and dealing with trauma. Trauma's a really interesting word. When it was first uh uh used by the DSM Diagnostic Statistic Manual, by definition, it involves something that was very rare. So uh it was used quite a lot after the war in Vietnam for soldiers who had gone through an experience there that was very different than uh what most people back in the States would have gone through. It's kind of shifted over the decades, and so uh it's become a much more common term. I think now probably people might feel a little insulted if you were to say to them you've never been traumatized by something. Yeah. How do you think about trauma and uh how do you encourage folks to think about it?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:01

Uh well, we definitely know that uh violence is a traumatizing experience in the clinical sense. So we um we think it's incredibly important that engagement with survivors of violence be done in a trauma-informed way. And that's really important. Say that.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:24

I'm sorry, one more time.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

That survivors of violence be uh interacted with in a trauma-informed way. So if I'm a police investigator, for instance, and I'm presented with a survivor of uh sexual assault, uh, for me to even be able to do a a good interview, investigative interview, which is maybe my job as a criminal investigator is to get the evidence from the survivor, this victim of crime. Uh I'm not going to be actually even good at that job unless I do it uh in a trauma-informed way, understanding how trauma is going to affect my interactions. Same way with that survivor's road to restoration and healing. That also needs to be trauma-informed. The other thing, though, that has been important for us is the way that our team members who are engaged with people and situations of violence are going to over time experience secondary trauma, which is not a critical incident kind of trauma that someone who experiences the violence is having, but it has a cumulative effect over time. And that if caregivers are not attending to the impact of secondary trauma, um there's going to be uh eventually a challenge with that. And so this is just in the nature of the work that we do, uh important to it. Um yeah. And of course, we're learning a lot more uh about this. It is true, it's also entering the uh the vernacular is uh a word that um uh maybe is is losing its uh critical uh clinical clarity.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:17

And sometimes that's important to but then engaging with the clinical world and what are the most effective therapeutic interventions for trauma.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:25

Critically important for the survivors and victims of uh violence that we engage and also for our staff. So we we spend a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to staff care resources that uh address uh secondary trauma.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:43

I just remembered I uh there's one more question I want to ask you, and it actually goes back to something we were talking about um earlier off camera. So you got time for one more question? Love it. Uh you made a statement about um two different conditions that people tend to find themselves in now. Uh yeah, and one of them has to do with safety. Um you remember, so I'll just would would you would you repeat that observation? Yeah. And part of why I asked that is I'm just imagining lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of folks listening thinking, Gary Hogan for crying out loud, Harvard IGM releasing hundreds of thousands of people from slavery. You know, I'm selling shoes. What how does my life matter? So, so talk a little bit about that observation of the human condition. And then for the person who's listening right now that is kind of overwhelmed and thinks, eh, my life doesn't matter much. Well, what does that mean for what everybody who's listening to us might do?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:43

Oh I I would love to respond to that. Uh first, though, just the idea of um the maybe the big things that IJM have done, and then does my life really matter? Um also what's so important about that is the thing that Mother Teresa would always say about for her, she ended up picking up, I guess, 40,000 people off the streets of Calcutta who were in places of just either dying or in desperate need. But she would always just say it started just by uh helping one off the street. And the thing that she did, she ministered to people who were literally dying in the streets and that she couldn't even stop from dying, but she was gonna allow them to die with dignity. It turns out actually anybody could do that in terms of qualification. But who went and did that? Yeah, like nobody. And who could do that not only once, but twice and then 40,000 times over decades? That's the person who was just doing the one good thing that required no qualification at all, but it was the good thing of love right in front of them. And they just gave that as an offering to God every day. Most of what IJM has done has come from a place of just offering the one good thing that was in front of us. When IJM started, if we couldn't help one or two people, that was a good year in the entire year.

unknown 1:16:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:17

And in fact, that would have, no, honestly, and I think in the first year or two, we maybe helped five people. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:23

But were they not so worthy from from what Jesus said about their lives, they were. But what I also find in the world today, and this is just verified by all of the data that emerges, that the human beings have never been in the history of the world more anxious or more sad. But they've also never in the history of the world been more affluent or safer. So here we have human beings more safe and affluent than they've ever been, but also more anxious and more sad than they've ever been. And the followers of Jesus in that world could into that context just bring an incandescent freedom from fear, thanks to Jesus, and an incandescent life-giving joy. What a witness it would be everywhere in every circumstance if the followers of Jesus were simply living in freedom from fear today, and also a life-giving joy today. And in a culture in which we've the humans have never been so sad or so anxious, it's just the word incandescent that occurs to me. And I think that was the light of the world that Jesus intended we us to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:52

Wow. Incandescent is a uh wonderful word. I don't even want to say to stop on, just to pause on. I I hope we can do this again. Um I'm very grateful. Um man. God for you and for Jan and for your children and for your work and 1500 staff and lives that will be in danger and lives all around the world. Thanks, John. God bless you really deeply. Amen. Thank you.