It Takes Getting Lost To Be Found

It’s been a year now since…the incident.  I could have written about it months ago, because I knew what God taught me through it, but that would mean reliving it.  I’m not particularly keen on going over, and over, and over terrifying events that involve any of my four daughters.  But I’ll do it for you, because God has a message not just for me, but for you too. And we don’t put our light under a basket when others are searching for light in the darkness (Matthew 5:15). That would just be silly.

Last summer we got together with my husband’s extended family in sunny California where there are no bad days.  We rented some bikes for the second year in a row and headed to the same paved bike trail.  We were a mix of big bikes, little bikes, tandem kids on the back of big bikes, and pulled trailers for toddlers.  We were quite a spectacle of ages and stages.

We were on our way, trying to stay together even though we were a group of sixteen.  On the first little bridge and sharp turn one of the cousins lost control and went right off the side into a gnarly thorn bush.  The poor girl was beat up and bleeding before we even broke a sweat.  I stopped with my bike and trailer that held my then 3-year-old and pulled out every bandaid I could find in my backpack.  My husband and other three girls got well ahead of me, because they were unaware of what had transpired.

We left our patched up cousin in the caring hands of her parents and continued the ride.  We passed beautiful wildflowers, wild blackberries, and waved at passers by.  Eventually I picked up the pace and found some more of our group.  Quite some time had passed before I caught up to my husband who I assumed was with our other three.   He had our 5-year-old Stella on the back of his tandem bike and our 7 and 10-year-old, Elena and Dahlia, were riding solo.  Except the solo riders were not with him.

Elena leading the pack before things took a wrong turn

“Where are the other two?” I asked with just a prickle of anxiety that almost an hour had passed without hearing from them.  “I was with them, but I missed a turn so they got ahead with the first group.”  “Who is the first group, do they know they’re with them?”  Now I took off asking the others to call the adults while I was calling my oldest on her watch.  She wasn’t answering.  So now I was shouting at any adult who would listen.  I was pedaling as hard as I could at this point without tipping the trailer while calling my oldest repeatedly.  She finally answered and I yelled between huffing for breath, “Where are you?  Are you with Elena?!”  She too sounded breathless, and told me she was pretty sure Elena was with her, but she didn’t actually see her.

Now my heart was pounding and it wasn’t from pedaling.  I was in full mom-panic racing to find my unaccounted for 7-year-old who has the absolute worst sense of direction.

It felt like she was missing for hours, but it was probably only a matter of minutes from the time we realized she was unaccounted for until I received an unknown phone call.  When my phone rang I was approaching a break in the bike path where it meets a busy road.  There was my little girl, standing on the side of the road with a stranger on her phone, trying desperately to keep it together.  As soon as she saw me she broke down, shaking both out of fear and uncontrollable sobbing.

I was flooded with relief to see her, but the adrenaline was more than my body could take and I could feel every part of my being trembling as I held onto Elena, unable to get close enough for her to feel secure again.  Fear and adrenaline do things to your brain, so all I can remember from the first moments was profusely thanking the woman who was with her, barely able to keep it together, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I also remember repeatedly telling Elena, “I will never, ever lose you.  I will always find you.”  The kind stranger proceeded to tell me that Elena was on the side of the busy road alone with her bike and boldly waved her car down so she pulled over.  Elena was able to give her my phone number because a wonderful friend of mine made my girls backpack tags with my phone number.  Elena had memorized it after seeing it so many times.  So I am forever grateful to you Alyssa.

The woman who stopped was a mother with a child in a car seat in the back.  Not a creepy man alone.  Not a person with bad intentions.  A mother with a child.  An angel, sent from God Himself to rescue and protect Elena until I could get to her.  I will never run out of gratitude for the woman who stopped and my God who sent her.

Once she was convinced we were not awful people and neglectful parents she got in her car and left.  That’s when my fear converted into rage.  I only slightly held back because my kids were present, but I probably let some colorful language slip in Spanish.  I wanted someone to blame and I wanted their head for it.  I scream-called Dahlia on her watch and told her to stop everyone and come back, “NOW.”  The ride is over, the day is over, the trip is over, we now live and move as an ameba of six forever and ever, and you cannot tell me I’m overreacting right now or I’ll have your head too.

As a mother does, I pretended for Elena that everything was okay.  She was only lost for a little bit, she did the absolute right thing, and was so brave and smart to stop and ask for help and to not keep going on her bike.  I promised we would never, ever separate again and we just needed to get back to our car.

She was refusing to even touch the bike let alone ride it again.  So I told everyone else to back off and get lost.  I alone would slowly get her back at her pace and would not leave her side.  Like ever.  I charged my husband with getting Dahlia and Stella back, and under no circumstances would they split up.

Elena finally agreed to get on her bike and head back with me at a snail’s pace.  When we stopped for my 3-year-old to pee on the side of the road in plain day Elena even cracked a smile.  I had been fake smiling since heading back.  As a mother you learn to be the master distractor so I pointed out flowers, gave them snacks, and pretended to be chipper and animated.  When really, I wanted to abandon the bikes, cry inconsolably, hold all my babies and take an uber home.

We made it back and I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone because I still wanted to blame someone for losing my kid, I didn’t care who, I was still blaming my own husband at this point, anyone but myself, because I’m her mother so I would never lose her.  No one, not even Elena, was aware of the gravity of what had just transpired.

What if she had kept going down the wrong road?  What if some creep had stopped instead of a nice mom?  What if she got scared, turned around and ended up in the road in oncoming traffic?  The dire scenarios were endless for a 7-year-old alone on a busy street.  And I was tortuously going through every single one of them.

We skipped dinner, headed back to the house and tried to scrub off the dirt, sweat and fear.  We fed the kids, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever have an appetite again.  Once they were all asleep in their beds I cried over Elena’s safe, unharmed body.  Again, all I could muster was, “Dear God, thank you, thank you, thank you…”.   

The next morning I looked at my phone and saw a missed call from an unknown number.  The kind mother who had stopped for Elena!  I was so wrapped up in my own anxiety I didn’t even properly express my gratitude to the woman.  She was calling me at the same time I pulled up to find Elena, so I never answered it.  But I could call her and thank her!  I proceeded to do so, professing how she was truly an angel sent to rescue my child and I did not even know how to begin to thank her.

I felt relieved I was able to properly thank her, but I was still harboring anger that the entire situation had even transpired.  I was not ready to admit that there was no one to blame but bad planning, and at this point I had taken to blaming myself.  I did not take control of the situation and look what had happened?  If only I had been in control, Elena never would have gone through the trauma of being lost.  I had convinced myself I could have avoided it, so it was all my fault.

As if I have any control?!  That’s the funny thing about control.  The more you think you have, the less in control you will actually be.  Things will go wrong.  Plans will change.  Kids will get hurt.  Thinking that I can actually determine the daily outcomes for each of my kids will leave me weary, defeated, and well, out of control.  It’s just not humanly possible.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to send my 7-year-old on bike rides alone on unknown streets, but I do let her ride with her sister to school after practicing it with me.  I am responsible with who God has entrusted to me, but in the end they are His, and He is sovereign over everyone and everything (Colossians 1:16-17).

He loves my kids even more than I do.  God loves them enough to give up His own Son for them, for all of us.  He wants us with Him for all of eternity.  I know this because I learned it as a child in Sunday school in the verse John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  I might have memorized this as a child, but I believed it as an adult.    

Some months later during my bible study, with this whole situation out of my mind, I was led by the Holy Spirit to surrender my kids to the Lord.  It’s in writing.  There’s no taking it back.  It was the most freeing and terrifying act of obedience I have committed to date.  I wrote in my own print that I was entrusting the lives of my children to God.  Psalms 91 gave me the trust I needed to surrender.

I will take years off my life worrying and no good will come of it (Matthew 6:27).  I’ll make my kids miserable and mistrusting in the process too.  If I’m always worried and controlling of them what message does that send to my kids about my trust in God?

When I look back at the whole situation, I see a frazzled and terrified mother, yes, but I also see my daughter safe under God’s wing.  I couldn’t askfor a better person to stop for my lost child.  I didn’t know where my child was or who she was with, but you know who did?  God. He knew the whole time, because He was in control the whole time.  Elena knows that she has a God who loves her and sent her a stand-in mom angel while she was waiting for me to catch up.  You don’t know loving care like that until you have lived it.

Two years later forging a new path. Replacing fear with strength and trust.

It took me losing control to relinquish control.  It led me to the best decision of surrendering my children to the loving care of the Lord.  It’s a load off trusting Him with their lives instead of myself.  I hate that it took Elena getting lost to get my attention that God is the only one with any control, but I trust she will someday see that as part of her story.  She is loved by a God who pursued and protected her, even on the side of a scary, busy street.

The same knots form in my stomach when I recall the terror of the “what if’s” and the fear of not knowing where she was, but the rescue now overshadows it all.  We are all lost until Jesus rescues us and we finally experience what it means to be found.