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The Devil's Nightmare. Welcome back to another episode of It's Time to Man Up. I've got with me today, man, a man, you want to talk about Man Up.
Well, Steven Henson has definitely done that as he has worked over in the Philippines for many, many years with homes of hope and compassionate hope. Steven, welcome to The Man Up Show. Hey, great to be here. Well, great to have you with us, Steven. And I'm excited to talk about what it is you're doing, because it's a very hot topic in today's culture, but some want to shy away from it, Steven, and don't really want to talk about it. And I had your mom on The Man Up Show just not too long ago talking about her book, Breaking Invisible Chains. And I was just excited to talk to you about homes of hope. And it's pretty amazing what you guys are doing, but let's give our listeners just some quick backstory. Are you living in the Philippines? Are you living here in the States?
Or give us a little backstory on Steven Henson. Yeah, well, currently, my living situation, I tell people I'm an MPA, no permanent address. Okay, I like that. But usually, our rotation is, we're in the Philippines for about 10 months.
And then we're back in the US for a few months, seeing friends and family and telling people about what Compassionate Hope is doing in the Philippines and in Thailand. And now when you say we, like who's included in the we? Oh, yeah. My wife, Kathleen. Okay, Kathleen. Kathleen, yeah. Who does 90% of the work, but I get 90% of the credit. There's always a good woman behind every man, right? Oh, absolutely. But we really do work shoulder to shoulder in this mission, and she actually is Filipino.
She grew up in Manila area in a very low income family, but she raised herself out of her poverty situation through hard work and education. And so we met actually in my first mission ship there in 2011. And we now have been married almost 11 years, and we have two beautiful children that are nine and 10.
So do they... So, wow. So that's got to be quite an experience, I would think, for your children to grow up around what you're doing as well.
Yeah, they are world travelers and have been back and forth to the U.S. and the Philippines almost probably 10 times at least in their lifetime. Wow. Okay. My little girl has actually spent more of her life now in the Philippines than she has in America, but they were both born here in the middle Tennessee area.
And we actually surrendered to do full-time ministry in 2016. So you guys are in the middle Tennessee, like the Nashville area, kind of that? Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. I'm very familiar with that area.
I've got my oldest daughters, Taryn and Tawny, who live in Ashland City and Pleasant View, and then my youngest daughter, Colby, who lives in Brentwood. So I'm very familiar with Nashville. Yeah. So, well, that's pretty amazing. And so you're Executive Director of the Philippines.
I know you also have homes in Thailand, and from what I recall with that conversation with your mom in an undisclosed country, kind of flying under the radar, right? And what's... I think you said 2016, is that when you felt called, prompted to do this? Yeah, absolutely. And so prior to that, what were you doing, Steven, prior to 2016 then? Well, I'll give you the back-back story. How about that?
Okay. Because it's really important to show how God can use anyone. At birth, I was not supposed to live. I was born with multiple birth defects. It's called Botter or Wachter syndrome. And each letter represents something that's wrong with a body. I was born with severe scoliosis and a missing half vertebrae in my spine.
So it looks kind of like a question mark instead of being straight. The most life-threatening thing that I had was my stomach and esophagus were not connected at all. Wow. So there was no way for me to get food into my body. So they had to actually stick a tube into my stomach. And I was tube fed for the first year and a half of my life. And then they had to... You have saliva and mucus that's draining.
So where would that go? So I actually had to cut a hole in the side of my neck. And so that was actually one of the experiences of my mother's life was taking care of me like a nurse for the first two years. But through lots of surgery and prayer, God allowed me to live. And so a lot of people call me a miracle baby. And so from there, graduating high school when I was around 17 or 18, I started working for an organization called Nelson Mazda.
They're one of the largest Mazda dealerships in the state of Tennessee. So I started there washing cars and it was my heart and desire to be successful. And it was really that desire to be successful, which kind of led me away from the Lord. And so I went through a 10-year period of my life where I was around the wrong friends, wrong people.
And so I wasn't doing what God wanted me to do. But through the years, I attained all my goals. I became successful. I went from selling cars to finance.
So eventually, I was the sales manager of the largest Mazda dealership in the state of Tennessee. And I had reached my goals. But yet, because I wasn't following the Lord inside, I was just miserable.
Right, right. And so around 2010, on the floor of my bedroom one night, I just met God. And I literally was crawling on the floor, just repenting of my sins. And from that night, I've never been the same. And how I got to the Philippines is a really unique story. When I was at the dealership, at that time, I was Salesman of the Year. And they gave a trip for two anywhere in the United States, they were going to pay for everything. So I went to my father, who was doing the Compassionate Hope Ministries. And I said, Hey, Dad, can I go on a missions trip with you?
It was purely for fun. I just had a repentive point in my life. And I'm trying to kind of get away from some bad influences to clear my mind and just get away. And he was like, I'm going to India, Thailand, the Philippines, I'm like, Philippines, it's like an island, right? I'm like going on Google, nothing about the Philippines. And so I decided to go to the Philippines. And we ended up going February 2011. We were he was actually going to speak to a pastor's group there. And in one of the churches that he was speaking at, is where I met my wife.
Okay. So we met about two years later, we got married, and came back to the US and lived here. And that was right around the time I, I was being that first trip, God started calling me to the Philippines, but I became a lot like Jonah, being called them. I'm like, No, I don't think you want me to go to the Philippines. I learned I don't think you want me to really go here.
It's pretty impoverished there. It's gonna be hard work. And I just got, I just got promoted to my dream job, which was being the store manager of the dealership and got married and everything. Life is good, God. Let's not mess things up. Okay. Don't rock the boat, Lord.
Pun intended, don't rock the boat here, Lord. So I came back and just, you know, even though God was calling, you know, you just get into life. Yeah, right. Get a groove or into a rut, maybe a routine, routine. Maybe that's better.
Get into a routine. Yeah. You know, my wife's heart was also there. So she kept reminding me and asking me these questions. She calls me babe. She goes, Babe, what's, what's our ministry?
Hmm. And I kept saying, you know, we, we go to Sunday school, and we help in the church. And sometimes I'll do an usher. And then so with that question, I just started trying to dive in more into local ministry. And even at our dealership, I got involved with helping start on Friday mornings, we had a Bible study, and we would invite customers up. And we'd have to share the Word of God. And so all these things, I kept being able to kind of pat myself on the back about how I'm doing God's work.
Right is great. It's really great to do God's work. But it's even greater do it to do the work he's calling me to. And so one of the one of the ladies in our church, she got up and spoke. And she mentioned how she had a prayer list. And she would put 10 things on the prayer list. And the reason she loved doing that is she loved to be able to check off when God answered prayer, which is really neat. You know, you don't think about praying and actually see, you know, we don't really realize how many prayers God answers, right, right.
When we're when we're specifically praying for things. So we got home that night. And I said, Okay, let's, let's do a list that sounds like, like, it's really unique. And we made a list. And we're praying for people that were lost.
We had when we had just had our first son, Gabe, Gabriel, and we had gotten an unexpected $25,000 bill, you know, because like insurance mess up. And so we make this list and we get to the 10th thing. And she looks at me again. And she brings up this question. She says, What's our ministry?
And I said, I don't know, but let's write it down. And we'll pray over it. And within two or three days, we get a letter in the mail, showing that we don't owe anything from the medical expenses. And it was amazing because we were expecting to pay two or $3,000 because she had epidural, but nothing we didn't pay what we didn't pay one penny. And she was like, Okay, guys, you're answering these prayers.
And through that praying, I was really praying more than my wife knew about what is our ministry. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. And, you know, lo and behold, this internal conflict that I was having with the Lord. He won. And I finally surrendered to do full time ministry in the Philippines.
Sometime in the middle of 2016. So eventually, I met, I met with my dad, and I said, Dad, God's calling me to do full time ministry. And so we're, we're at a sonic and we're crying. And he said, I know, he's like, I knew the Lord was calling you, but I didn't want to push you into ministry because I wanted to be your choice. And I said, Dad, well, you think that we could duplicate the villages of hope and the homes of hope that were that we're doing in Thailand in the Philippines, because that's where I feel the Lord is, is calling me.
And he said, Absolutely. So, you know, I'm thinking, okay, I'm God's calling me to be a missionary. I've had zero Bible training.
You know, although I was a pastor's kid for a long time, there was 10 years of my life where, you know, I was pretty much absent from church and all these other things. And so I'm like, Dad, how can I go and be a missionary? And he asked me this question, he says, Do you want to grow and then go?
Or do you want to go and grow? And I said, Well, can I do both? And he said, that's the right answer. And so I immediately enrolled into Liberty University. To start a master's degree program, my, my bachelor's is in business administration and finance. So actually, we'll graduate from Liberty, I've got one class left. So I'll graduate this year, with a master's in Christian ministry. And we, I went home, and I told my wife, Hey, I think you need to sit down. And I said, Hey, I'm quitting my job. And we are sometime going to go to the Philippines is full time ministry.
She fell off the couch. Oh, answer the prayer. Answer the prayer. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, by, by Jane, sorry, by June 2017, June 2017, through a lot of miracles of the Lord, we were we were in the Philippines. And we had this vision of villages of hope, and homes of hope. And you've got these two missionaries going to the Philippines, we had no clue what we're doing. We had very little training.
And most people would have said, these people shouldn't be in the mission field yet. But the only reason we're going is I had such a pull and a call from the Lord, saying you need to go now. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. If you would like to support Kolah for Christ Ministries, for a gift of $25 Nikita will send you his two CDs, Adoration and Declaration. For a gift of $50 Nikita will include his book, Wrestling with Success. And for a gift of $100 or more, Nikita will include a signed copy of his newly updated life story, A Tale of the Ring and Redemption.
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You're listening to the Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com. I want to recap for all of our listeners out there because that's some amazing, you gave some amazing statements, amazing quotes, and I just want to recap real quick before we get to what exactly the Holmes do, what you guys do before we run out of time. So multiple birth defects.
I just want to recap. I was writing down the word miracle when you were describing how you overcame, what you overcame the first couple of years of your life and so truly that is a miracle story. And then I wrote down, Steven, it's amazing, you said you had a heart to pursue success and many people do, right? In fact, I wrote a book about it, Wrestling with Success, right? Developing a championship mentality but that pursuit of success, I wrote down, took you away from the Lord, like it drew you away from the Lord and I'm reminded of something I experienced myself and that is I was successful but unfulfilled. That's what sounds like some of your story that success brought. It brought success but yet you were still unfulfilled. You're like, ah man, I don't, is this it?
Is this what? And then this is a great statement you made. It's great to do God's work even greater to do what God's called you to do. Of course, that reminds me of 2 Corinthians 5 where those who are reconciled back to Christ become a new creation and then he's given us a ministry of reconciliation to reconcile others back and verse 20 says then we are ambassadors for Christ.
And I love what your dad asked you, you want to go and grow or grow and go? And I want to emphasize one last thing and we're going to talk about these homes. 2010 was, I wrote down full surrender. In 2010 you get full surrender and then there was another period of time there that sounds like the Lord was growing you and preparing you even though you showed up in the Philippines feeling very unprepared. So alright, so let's talk about, we've got a few minutes, let's talk about on that note, so you had a vision, you go over, tell our listeners, let's just tell our listeners what homes for hope is.
Let's just go with that, okay? Describe what homes of hope and compassionate hope is. So the bigger picture is actually a village of hope and a village of hope would be like a Corinth or a community church in a village and in that village we would have a church and then we would have what we call homes of hope and then another important part would be education and economic stability.
So we have those four things, homes, church, school and something that allows us to have economic stability. But the homes of hope, the church is the heart of the village because it brings the spiritual development. But the homes of hope are a part of our mission in rescuing and restoring what we call the least of these, those that would be vulnerable.
Yeah, the weak, the poor, the vulnerable, right? Yeah, you know, it's our main focus to provide hope and future hope for victims and of human trafficking and online sexual exploitation and we deliver that with the primary vehicle of hope in a series of, our goal is to have around 10 homes for these at-risk kids to provide those physical services to those physical, emotional, educational and vocational, social, spiritual development and so we're seeing a lot of fruit already from what we were able to accomplish there. But to kind of go back a little bit just to talk about really the least of these, because the least of these that we focus on in the Philippines looks very different than our ministries elsewhere. And so our main focus, actually two weeks, it was really a miracle, two weeks before we went to the Philippines, we get an email from one of our friends who is the director for Compassion International, which is different than Compassionate Hope. They do child sponsorship, great organization. The Philippine director actually messaged me or messaged me, emailed my dad and said, hey, would you, are you doing anything in the Philippines? The email back, he said no, but my son will be there in two weeks.
We really had not broadcasted that we were coming there yet. And so we meet with him on a video call and he tells us about online sexually exploited children, or it's also known here in the States as CSAM, child sexual materials. And this is a topic, like you said earlier, a lot of people shy away from, uh, because it seems dirty and icky and it is disgusting, but yes, a lot of people just, uh, kind of like the ostrich with his head in the sand. Well, if we don't, if we close our eyes and we don't look at it and talk about it, maybe it'll go away.
Yeah, it's not going away. Um, but, uh, so my wife and I prayed about it. And after we met with another organization too, called international justice mission, uh, who is one of the largest anti trafficking organizations in the world.
And so we said, this is who God is calling us to build homes of hope for. And, you know, OSEC, uh, it's a billion dollar industry. And a lot of times when people think about human trafficking, they think about trafficking in person, you know, things like, uh, bars or prostitution, but online sexual exploitation is actually a thousand times more prevalent than in-person trafficking.
Sure. I mean, it's available at your fingertips, so, uh, you know, 80% of people that are involved with this, they're actually watching explicit materials on their homes. A lot of people ask me, well, why is this, why the Philippines? And so the Philippines, uh, is a very impoverished nation. Uh, in Manila, Manila is one of the most populated cities in the world. And some places on Google, it'll say it is the most populated city in the world per square foot. So it has one of the densest populations, which causes some of the poverty. Um, and so you have a country, the Philippines, uh, they, they last 20 plus years, they've been teaching English in their schools and they actually teach Filipino or Tagalog, which is their primary language as almost as a secondary language.
Uh, my two children have been in the school, so they actually learn Tagalog as like, we would learn Spanish in school. And so these children and the adults are able to communicate with the English speaking side of the world, which the English speaking side of the world, approximately according to Washington times has about 40% of the wealth in the world. And that was the older statistics. So it's probably more than that now. Uh, so you have supply and demand. So you have the supply side in the Philippines and the demand is coming. The U S is the number one country in the world that is exploiting children online.
A lot of that has to do with the size and the population, but you have England and Canada and Australia. And so it's just horrible, horrible things that are going on to these children. It is. Steven, let me ask you this, cause we're almost out of time. For people to find out more. Okay.
And I'm, I've got your brochure here in my hand. Compassion, hope is a Christ centered global charitable organization focused on providing hope for, and a future to victims and potential victims of human trafficking, religious persecution in the South East Asia area, one future leader at a time. And where, where can people go to find out more about compassionate hope and, and, or contribute if the Lord leads them to do that? What's the website? Yeah, absolutely. It's www dot compassionate hope.org.
Just click on the donate button. And a lot of times you can choose which home you want to support, you know, and it's our, our main goal in this at the end of the day is that we can rescue thousands, redeem millions by making disciples unstoppable in our lifetime. So really our main goal is making disciples out of these, uh, young boys and girls that we are rescuing here in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia.
Yeah. And I recall from my conversation with your mom that she said, it goes beyond just, you know, rescuing them. Of course, obviously you want to rescue. And, and she mentioned too, Tim Tebow, uh, Demi and Tim Tebow have, uh, you know, a Demi and Tim Tebow have an incredible video. I'm guessing there may be a link on, on your website as well, where people can go and just, and see, see actual stories of, of rescues, but it's more than just rescue.
I remember her saying, it's more than just rescue. We want to educate. As you mentioned, you got a school, you got a church. We want them to learn about Jesus.
Want to win them to the foot of the cross into the kingdom, educate them and set them on a path of success. I'll just say that, that they otherwise would not have had. Correct.
That's, that's part of the goal as well. Right. Uh, last thought, Steven, uh, last thought here, we got about 30 seconds before you run out of time.
Last thought. Um, you know, the last major thing is how big this is, you know, on the study for harm done by Nottingham, nearly that they, in 2022, nearly a half million Filipino children were trafficked to produce exploitation material. So the problem is not going away.
So I just ask everyone that we get our heads out of the sand. We become a voice for the children and we come together to fight against this evil of online sexual exploitation. Yeah.
I can't emphasize that enough. I know I do a lot of camps and I, and I'm challenging men, a lot of conferences, man up conferences ties in with the man up show, Steven, and I'm giving them statistics, you know, just the multiple, multiple billions of dollars, uh, that sex trafficking, uh, human trafficking and even the pornography industry. Right. Which feeds that industry. Right.
The porn industry as well. Well, so great to have Steven Henson with us today, executive director in the Philippines, compassionate hope. One more time, real quick. What's the website www.compassionatehope.org.
Compassionatehope.org. Go check it out. Great to have you with us today, Steven. And always, you are faithful to dial in each and every week.
Go out today. I challenge you to live with God field. God bless today.
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