Creative worship

Dear God, who created the heavens and the earth.

You created humanity in your own likeness. Let us not forgot that each person reflects the divine image, and we thank you that you teach us to recognize this. We thank you for our own safety, and for those who have so far been saved from the evil of human trafficking. We thank you for the strength you have given to people who are fighting against this corruption of your image.

As you led your children out of Egypt, we ask you to lead victims of all kinds of slavery and exploitation to freedom, both spiritual and material.

We ask that you give peace to the souls of the victims, that they can escape the circle of violence and we ask for justice in your infinite wisdom. We ask for the exploiters to recognize their sins, and to change their ways through your grace.

We pray for the awareness of society at large and ourselves, and that we can recognize the roots of injustice in our own actions and inactions, as Moses did when he saw when his Israelite brother was being beaten by an Egyptian slavemaster.

We have been taught in the Epistle to the Galatians that there is no more slave nor free, and yet through our own ignorance and cold-heartedness we have failed to recognize the exploited as our brothers and sisters, as Jesus showed us. For this we pray for forgiveness.

Together we pray, that you send the mercy of your spirit onto the whole of humanity, we who are your children.

Amen.

We pray for the awareness of society at large and ourselves, and that we can recognize the roots of injustice in our own actions and inactions, as Moses did when he saw when his Israelite brother was being beaten by an Egyptian slavemaster.

Our illustrator

Gabor Nemet (Serbia)

I belive that one of the biggest problems of the modern society is human trafficking. Since I am from Serbia, which is located in the Balkan region this topic is very hard and quite known to me. The Balkans were always politically unstable and they was a nest of smugglers. For traffickers the countries from this region are both countries of destination and transit. Unfortunately favorable factors have determined the formation of trafficking networks through countries such as Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo region, the countries of former Yugoslavia, Montenegro, Turkey and Greece. My artistic vision is reflecting on this topic through the fears and feelings of the youth in my environment. In my surroundings there were a couple of girls who were victims of human and sex trafficking, so that is why this topic was somehow personal to me. Through these pictures I tried to explain my feelings with regards to human trafficking and human slavery. Also human trafficking is still active in my region, especially because of the Serbia - Hungary border, which allows smugglers to pass only one boarder and to be on the EU soil, which means that here is no further border crossing. In the small vilages around the border you can still see people who are desperately reaching for the “better and promised life” abroad.