Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Vegas newsletter from summer 2010
Greetings everybody,
My name is Paul Lattimer, and this is my post summer newsletter from my 2 month missionary trip to Las Vegas. During my 2 month trip, I stayed at the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) base and helped staff the summer Mission Adventures Program. In short, this program hosts week long mission trips for teams all over the world. During my time in Vegas this summer, 9 other staff members and I trained over 120 people in the art of evangelism and shared the love of Jesus Christ with literally thousands of homeless, tourists, and locals on the streets of Las Vegas.
There were so many miraculous moments this summer, but, due to time and space, I can only share a couple in this newsletter (leaving out names of people intentionally for privacy purposes). First of all, each week I was given the opportunity to lead a small group, and it was amazing to see the growth in people from Florida, California, Oregon, Washington, Canada, and more. Also, I befriended some local homeless people and was able to share Jesus with them. I was quite happy to see how the love of Christ saved lives and broke drug and alcohol addictions firsthand.
While so many great things happened for God’s Kingdom this summer, this most impactful thing I think I did this summer was meet an undercover police offer on the streets of Sin City who explained to me the huge human trafficking and prostitution ring in Las Vegas. This was obviously a divine appointment because there are about a quarter million people walking the strip at any moment, and I just happened to run into this guy twice without even knowing he was a cop at first. He explained to me that girls (and boys) are taken from all over the world from ages as young as 5 years old and they are drugged, beaten, and abused until they are broken. Then they are brought to areas all over the world and forced to have sex with people. Las Vegas along with Thailand and some other places are some of the hugest epicenters for human trafficking. Anyhow, this cop and I were talking about how to stop this huge problem and to make a long story short, God used me to facilitate the connection between LVPD and YWAM so that each time we bring a prostitute or sex slave to Christ, we can call our police contact, and they can use their resources to follow through and actually help physically rescue them from their situation too! This is huge because now we can heal the whole person rather than just bringing Jesus into broken lives but still leaving them in the gutter when we leave. Now the rescued prostitutes and sex slaves of Las Vegas can have twofold freedom, both in Christ and from their physical chains.
Thank you all so much for those of you who have supported me on this trip, and I hope to be able to go out into the world and spread Christ’s love some more soon!
-Paul Lattimer.
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