Spiritual Voids

Saturday night a group of us went out dancing, to the one club that exists in Antep. I tried to loosen up and enjoy myself as much as possible, but the reality is, the night was a good reminder of why I never really got into secular party culture. As I looked around, all I could see was hurting people, desparation, and escapism. There is no true joy in that atmosphere.

Now, I do not think it is necessarily wrong for a Christian to go clubbing, but for me, I couldn’t handle it on any regular basis. It’s too depressing, seeing the soullessness of the experience. Customers at a dance club may be having fun, but it doesn’t pierce to their soul. At least that’s how it seems to me.

The worst thing is that we were sharing the dance floor with real live prostitutes. One of the girls who was with us, who works at a cafe near our apartments, told me after we had danced some, “You can find Russian girls here.” I had heard about the “Russian girls” in Antep before. “They are working,” the girl told me, which just confirmed it. Then she asked if I like Russian girls. “Not like that,” I told her.

But again, just knowing that some of the women there live that kind of lifestyle broke my heart a bit. These women will never have the chance to experience true life. They will always be trapped in a lifestyle of being objects, tools for men to satisfy a desire that is only a shadow of the real relationship with other human beings, and ultimately, with God Himself, the desire for which lies at the heart of their hurt, if they only knew it. It’s horrible that these women will most likely never know true humanity.

It made me think of the Samaritan women at the well. Her five husbands, and the lover she had when Jesus spoke to her, labelled her as lascivious. As a marginalized people, there were surely all kinds of stereotypes about the Samaritans. Could one of them have been that all Samaritan women are “loose women”? If so, then Jesus’s encounter with this woman was that much more a display of grace.

I say so because, in the liberal mindset that demands political correctness and never saying ill of a people group, there is a sort of morality that says it’s wrong to stereotype, but if a particular individual fulfills that stereotype, then he is even more wrong, because his actions reflect poorly on an entire people. In other words, if the stereotype is accurate in a particular case, it’s okay to marginalize that particular case. It’s a double standard, really.

But in the case of the Samaritan woman, if indeed there were such a stereotype, Jesus not only went against culture by talking to a Samaritan, a woman, and a promiscuous one at that, but also by talking to someone who fulfilled a stereotype, whom even supposedly tolerant modern liberal morality would accuse.

On the whole, this night club experience was a glimpse into the darkness that grips this city. So pray for Antep. Pray that the gospel would loosen the grip of darkness. Pray that I might have opportunities to share this view with my colleagues and friends here, that the gospel might be reflected through conversations about it.