There's a moment most fathers will recognize. You're watching your child sleep, or you catch them laughing at something across the room, and a quiet, fierce thought rises up: I would do anything to keep them safe.
It's not loud. It's not performative. It's just true.
A few weeks ago, one of our supporters—a husband and father named Chad—wrote to us about that instinct. He didn't write a polished theological treatise. He wrote what he was working out in his own life:
"As a husband and father I desire to take care of my family in every way possible. I am learning that this desire comes from God. He desires to take care of His creation. To love others as myself means to care deeply for others as I do for my immediate family. ... As a husband and father, would I want my own family falling into the traps of slavery and trafficking? NO! Then why would I want anyone to fall into that?"
It's the kind of question that, once you let it land, you can't quite walk away from.
Scripture has a name for what Chad is describing. It calls God "a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows" (Psalm 68:5). Throughout the Bible, God is not distant from the vulnerable—He's drawn to them. He stands in the gap. He defends. He provides shelter. He brings justice.
The protective love a good father feels for his own kids isn't the ceiling of what love looks like. It's a window into the heart of the One who made love in the first place.
That's why, when we read commands like "Defend the cause of the fatherless" (Isaiah 1:17) or "Look after orphans and widows in their distress" (James 1:27), they don't feel like burdens. They feel like an invitation to know our Father deeper.
Here's where the reflection turns into something harder to sit with.
More than three out of every four people our teams have intercepted in recent months have been minors. Children. Sons and daughters. Kids the age of the ones you might be making pancakes for this Sunday morning.
They are being moved across borders, deceived by job offers, abducted from playgrounds, sold by people who should have protected them. And in many cases, there is a father somewhere—searching, weeping, praying—who simply does not have the means to stand in the gap on his own.
Years ago, our Global Ambassador Doug Dworak wrote about a moment that has stayed with him. He was visiting one of our safe houses in South Asia when the parents of a young girl arrived to bring her home. They fell at the feet of the staff who had intercepted her. The father wept. He thanked our team for protecting his daughter when he could not.
Doug wrote, "In that moment I couldn't help but silently weep to myself as I thought about the wonderful privilege of being able to stand in the gap for thousands of parents like these, by protecting their daughters when they can't."
That is the heartbeat of this work.
It would be possible to fight trafficking out of outrage alone. Plenty of organizations do, and we're grateful for every one of them.
But our work is fueled by something deeper. We believe the same God who calls Himself a Father to the fatherless rescued us first—at great cost to Himself, while we were still strangers to Him. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not just the reason we believe protecting the vulnerable is right. It is the reason we believe it is possible to keep showing up, day after day, at bus stations and border crossings, in places most of the world will never see.
We love because He first loved us. We protect because He first protected us. We stand in the gap because He stood in ours.
Chad ended his note with a line that we keep coming back to:
"I, and my family, are taking steps to love as Christ loved us. He rescued us. Can we not help others?"
This Father's Day, you don't have to do everything. But you can do something.
You can stand in the gap for a father somewhere in the world who is doing everything he knows how to do—and still needs help. You can be part of the moment a child gets to go home instead of disappearing. You can let the protective love you feel for your own family extend, just a little further, toward someone else's.
That is what being a father's heart looks like in a broken world.
Happy Father's Day from all of us at Love Justice. To the fathers who provide, protect, and pray—and to the One whose heart is the source of it all.
*All data and statistics current at the date and time of publishing. Names changed and specific locations excluded for privacy and security purposes. Images are representative.