What is our identity?  I thought about this anew as I listened the other day to a presentation on human trafficking in the world.  The speaker made the point that perhaps the most insidious aspect of trafficking is its tendency to deprive those trafficked of their sense of identity.  Abused and exploited for in some cases over thirty years, trafficking's victims never have any opportunity to establish who they are.  Reduced by the trafficker to regard themselves as worthless and without any merit, they live unaware of their fundamental worth as human beings.
     This is tragic, unbearably tragic.  No one is made to never know who she is.  No one is created to never know why she is here, or to be told, day after day after day, that she is totally worthless.  But here is the challenge.  If we believe people are valuable simply because they are human beings, we in truth have no basis for doing so other than that we are human beings, too.  We have not solved the greater issue:  what makes us so important other than us telling ourselves that we are?
     Though I endorse any and all efforts to rescue people from the horrors of trafficking, I also hope that those delivered come to understand that they have been saved not just because they are human beings but because, ultimately, they are human beings who are creations of God.  We are valuable in and of ourselves, yes, but unless we are in this world through divine intention, we really have no reason to suppose ourselves any more important than anything else:  we're all accidents, anyway.