“From the first time I learned what human trafficking was, I could not turn a blind eye,” said Marilyn Limon, who first learned about the enslavement and sale of human beings as a freshman in high school, through the movie Human Trafficking. “My heart broke, and I felt immense compassion.”
As a student at St. Lawrence University and current president of the InterVarsity chapter there, Marilyn expresses her compassion by working to eliminate human trafficking and showing her campus that God cares about justice.
Going Where God Leads
Marilyn, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Mexico in their early twenties, grew up in Huntington Park, California. She became a Christian in 2009, as a junior in high school, and was full of enthusiasm for growing in her faith: “I like to think of myself as a sponge. I was hungry to learn as much as I could.”
When it came time to choose a college, Marilyn sought God’s guidance, and felt a calling to attend St. Lawrence, despite its faraway location in Canton, New York. “Without a doubt, God directed me there,” she said. Once she landed on campus, God directed Marilyn to InterVarsity, where she got involved and began serving the chapter through simple tasks, such as making announcements at the large group meeting. InterVarsity quickly became a safe community for Marilyn, supporting her as she has developed as a Christian. “Without InterVarsity, I wouldn’t have had the ability to grow in my faith,” she said. “It was where I learned how to spread God’s word.”
A New Heart for Justice
During the spring semester of her sophomore year, Marilyn helped her chapter spread God’s word to the campus in a new way. She brought the Human Wrong campaign, an initiative of the humanitarian aid organization World Vision, to St. Lawrence. The Human Wrong campaign seeks to help college students raise their awareness of child slavery and speak out against it on campus.
At St. Lawrence, the initiative spanned two weeks, with one week focused on raising awareness and the other focused on raising money. The InterVarsity chapter showed films, held demonstrations, and collected signatures to help pass anti-slavery legislation. The culminating event was a panel of professors, counselors and researchers from the university discussing the effects of human trafficking.
These events gave St. Lawrence students a new understanding of the realities of human trafficking—but the events also brought a new understanding of what InterVarsity was all about. Before the Human Wrong campaign, InterVarsity wasn’t well known on campus, and those who did know it considered it a group exclusively for Christians. But Human Wrong changed all that.
“The initiative let students know that we also care about social justice issues, because God cares deeply about justice,” said Marilyn. “Through the Human Wrong campaign, our presence and involvement grew and God’s glory was made known to the campus.” The St. Lawrence InterVarsity chapter members had a new context for sharing God’s love with their campus, as well as a greater vision for how their activities could reflect the fullness of what God cares about.
Change Beyond the Campus
Marilyn was excited to have helped raise awareness on her campus, but she didn’t stop there. During the spring of 2013, she studied abroad in Vienna, Austria, where prostitution is legal. Marilyn volunteered with Herz Werk (Heart Work), a nonprofit that offers support and counseling to women in prostitution. Although not all of these women are trafficked, many of them are, and the volunteers of Herz Work visit, pray with, and provide resources for them all.
Marilyn witnessed the trust and peace that came when volunteers and women prayed together. “God is the only one who can cast out all fear and renew a damaged soul,” she said. Marilyn has had other opportunities to work with nonprofits as they serve trafficking victims, including praying for change while walking in high-risk areas with Nightlight International Los Angeles and visiting safe houses for victims in the Cancun, Mexico, area. “God has put many opportunities in my life that have allowed me to minister to young girls,” said Marilyn.
Marilyn has also seen how fighting trafficking works on a larger institutional level. While she was interning for a state Senator in California this summer, Marilyn was able to speak with politicians, lobbyists, and the Attorney General, who all share her passion for ending modern-day slavery. “I got to see what it’s like to work with agencies and institutions to enact change,” she explained.
Through her experiences in the Senate, Marilyn realized that she wanted to continue working for justice through enacting public policy: “I feel like working in the legislature is where I can actually make a difference. I want to dedicate my career to combating human trafficking in California.”
Although she believes that everyone should educate themselves about and work to end human trafficking, Marilyn is also committed to the spiritual side of helping victims of trafficking: “A victim can be rescued and freed, but I believe that only God can truly free the person in all areas.”
It’s Marilyn’s prayer that “God’s unshaken truth, God’s unmatched hope, and God’s unconditional love” transform the lives of victims and traffickers alike, and it’s her hope that she can spend her career fighting slavery for the sake of God’s love for every human being.
