“Mommy, that lady over there has pretty pink hair. I like it.”

We had decided to go downtown to the Science museum after church. For some reason parking wasn’t free that day and we had zipped across the street to get cash from the ATM. My husband had stepped inside the gas station and the kids and I were just waiting in the car. It isn’t the safest or nicest area of town… the area right around Fair Park in Dallas, and even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday he made sure to lock the car door behind him when he stepped out.

I turned to look at the lady. She was standing on the median between the gas station and the McDonald’s smoking a cigarette and drinking from a McDonald’s cup. She had on shorts and a t-shirt with a hoodie tied around her waist. She was maybe halfway across the parking lot again from where our car sat, but she was close enough to see the track marks and bruises on her legs. She was just standing there. My husband told me later that when he got out of the car he was greeted with a ‘Hey Baby’ but that when he came out she only asked if he could spare a couple bucks. Maybe by the time he came out of the gas station she had noticed the family waiting in his car. I don’t know.

I live in a relatively safe neighborhood. I have a beautiful house and I drive a car that gets me where I need to go. My kitchen is full of food and most of the time my worries center around my children and the laundry and their education and piano lessons and bill paying and a job I love and a husband I want to bless. I think about whether my kids eat all the healthy food on their plates and whether they get enough sleep. I think about how to help my husband with various tasks that will bless him and how I can make our home more welcoming to everyone who lives here and how I can get over my hesitancy to hospitality when the house is less picked up than I would like..

But I don’t usually think about women on street corners. Not really. Yesterday though, I thought about the lady with the pink hair most of the afternoon. I wondered what had happened in her life that she was saying ‘Hey Baby’ to strangers outside a gas station. I wondered how long she had been doing that. I wondered about the little girl she had been. And my heart hurt.

It hurt for her. And it hurt for my daughter. And it hurt for all the little girls in the world who are lost. And I was ashamed… because I don’t think about women on street corners. I think about laundry and puppy accidents and piano lessons and whether or not my kids should play soccer or T-ball this Summer.

And I was ashamed. Because most of the time while men and women and boys and girls are bought and sold and damaged to the point where they have to stand on street corners… I’m complaining about how much laundry I have to do or the dishes I have to wash.

And I look at my facebook and twitter streams and read all the happy news and I look at Pinterest and I see all the pretty things. But I didn’t see the lady’s pretty pink hair on Sunday… at least that wasn’t what I saw first. And that makes me sad.