“You’re a walking dead woman,” doctors told Heather Schott. “You should be dead.”
Days earlier, the 17-year-old had overdosed on a cocktail of drugs at a party. Thinking she was dead, the dealer dumped her body in an abandoned apartment in downtown Seattle.
“He left me on the ground like trash,” Schott told The Epoch Times. She lay unconscious for three days before anyone found her.
Even Schott’s father didn’t seem to notice she was gone. She was living with him at the time but he had his own struggles with substance abuse.
After she missed school, however, the school contacted Schott’s mother, who began searching for answers.
She tracked down Schott’s dad, and together they found one of their daughter’s friends, who identified the dealer from the party and forced him to reveal where he had left Schott’s body.
“I gained consciousness for the first time on the third day,” Schott said, recounting the start of her trip back to life. She could faintly hear voices. “They thought I was dead,” she recalled.
“I tried to move to get the door to squeak open, so that they would not leave me,” she said.
At the hospital, doctors told her, “You have more drugs in your system than what should kill three grown men.” It was a pivotal moment for Schott. She began searching for meaning in life. “Why am I alive?” she asked.
Three months later, “after a series of God encounters,” she began attending church.
Schott described her first experience with God as a “washing wave of peace.”
“I hadn’t felt peace, I don’t think, my whole life … Tears began to come down my face, and I said, this is the feeling, this right here.”
That feeling would replace the drugs she had used to numb her pain. “This peace is what I want to be the obsession and addiction for the rest of my life,” she said. “I never turned back.”
Schott found the answer to her search for purpose in the fight against human trafficking, and turned her personal story of redemption into restoration for others.
Today, she is a senior pastor at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and the founder of The Justice Reform, which aids human trafficking survivors.
“There are millions of people that are entrapped in sex slavery,” Schott said. She feels a weight of responsibility to fight “until it’s ended, until the giant is down.”
Bringing Redemption
Almost 20 years ago, Schott heard a missionary talk about human trafficking in Thailand.
The speaker had largely stopped giving talks about human trafficking in the United States because churches across the country had asked her to keep her talks “G-rated.”
“The truth is, there’s nothing G-rated about this industry,” she said.
“She began to tell the most horrific stories,” Schott said. “I will still cry as I think about the first stories that I heard … about finding babies in trash cans that had just been raped over and over to the point of death.”
She struggled to believe what she was hearing, but felt the compelling conviction that if it were true, everyone should act to stop it.
Now the mother of three works daily to bring awareness to the issue of human trafficking.
More than 27 million people worldwide are victims of trafficking at any given time, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. An estimated 23 percent of victims—about 6.3 million people, most of them women and girls—are sex trafficked, while 77 percent are trafficked for labor.
The Justice Reform, the organization Schott founded, , trains advocates to work with human trafficking survivors, and builds long-term “redemption homes”—long-term homes to bring healing and restoration to people traumatized by human trafficking.
The first of those homes is a facility that will house up to 100 human trafficking survivors. Dubbed The Justice Residence, it’s under construction in Fort Worth, Texas.
Running for Freedom
Another of The Justice Reform’s initiatives is the Justice Run, an event to raise awareness and resources while physically “calling people into the fight” against trafficking.
“I think a lot of people want to get involved [but] they don’t know how to get involved,” Schott said. The Justice Run is a way for them to get involved body and soul, praying against human trafficking as they train for the run.
Schott is a runner and recounts the inspiration for the Justice Run. She was out on a run one day, but feeling that she wanted to give up and go home.
As she turned around to go home, “I have a full-on open vision, and I see a sea of runners, thousands of runners,” she said. But instead of numbers on their backs, the runners are bearing the faces of human trafficking victims.
She knew “they’re running for the freedom of those that have been trafficked.”
“We have been raising up an army of advocates,” Schott says.
The annual event features 5K, 10K, half and full marathons and will take place in Washington and Fort Worth this fall.
Unafraid
“Isaiah 61 describes that God has anointed us to bind up the brokenhearted and to set the captives free,” Schott told The Epoch Times.
“There are millions of people that are entrapped in sex slavery … and in the same way that God heard the cries of slaves in Egypt, he sent Moses to set his captives, his people, free … God is jealous for these millions of souls. They’re his sons and daughters that are entrapped in slavery.”
Confronting human trafficking is not comfortable, Schott said, but people must not be afraid to “get their hands dirty.”
She cited Dietrich Bonhoeffer, famous for his resistance against the Nazis, and his book, “Ethics.” In that book, the German pastor posited that in the face of the evil the Nazis were committing, choosing to do nothing to stay “innocent” was actually a form of sin.
In a movie about his life, Bonhoeffer’s character said, “You Christians have only learned how to keep your hands clean. This will take dirty hands. Dirty hands are all I have left to offer.”
While fear may follow actions to help the downtrodden members of society who are enslaved, that spirit of fear is nothing but a spiritual attack, she said. Once one says “yes” to the fight, God’s blessings come exponentially.
The Texas pastor said scripture is behind her motivation to help trafficking survivors.
“I know the works, I know the wonder, I know the power of Christ that is going to set them free, also the same way that he did me.”
