A Lost Child

Friday night I headed over to help with food preparation of a wedding that was to take place the following day.  This was my 3rd wedding in a few months, so by now I knew well my role and responsibilities.  I arrived on Friday and quickly began peeling and chopping veggies.  All the women from our church were there and the night continued as normal, but I could feel that something was not the same.  About an hour into it I learned that the son of the women who was about to get married had disappeared this morning at 10 AM.  Her son, who is about 8 years old and is developmentally disabled, had walked out this morning and not been seen since.

We worked late into the night preparing food for the next day, but the unspoken question was floating around of whether the wedding would take place if the boy was not found.  Before leaving we gathered around the grieving mother to pray.  People gathered from our church all around town to lift this child up to our father.  The women of our church decided that they trusted that God would do something and that we would continue preparations in faith that a wedding would be taking place the next day.

The next morning, Cecil and I made rounds around the last area that the boy had been seen, before continuing on the the kitchen as Cecil was now responsible to oversee the food preparations.  The bride was a wreck and understandably so.  We all worked in silence, constantly praying that God would do something and bring this child back home.  About noon, 3 hours before the wedding we got the call that the boy had been found.  Cecil and I hoped in the car to go pick him up and returned him home to celebration and dancing.  He was found in a village outside of town.  We don’t really know what happened as the boy only knows a few words, but we do know that somehow he got lost and was found by a family out in the village who housed him for the night.  The best part of the day for me was gathering around this mother and praising God together as a church for what he had done.  No one doubted that it was the grace of God who had acted to protect this child and bring him back to us.

God is Good!