Another quiet neighborhood

Is it just ME, or do you, too, wonder how on a quiet suburban street - it could be anywhere – women have been held against their wills for as long as 10 years? 

Last night was another sleepless night for me.  I turned the television on; it went right back to the last news channel I had been watching. 

Sometime in the wee hours, the “breaking news” came on…a young girl who had gone missing about ten years ago had been freed by the neighbor who had been living right next door all the while; he never knew she was there.  Impossible, one would think!  There were two others.

The details are still being sorted, the arrests have been made, the town is celebrating, a new hero has been found among us, and we are left wondering, why?

 

Jaycee Dugard had been held captive in the backyard of her abductor’s house for 18 years.  She had given birth.  She had been missed by the social service workers who regularly visited that house, checking up on one Phillip Garrido.  HOW?

Have we become a world of disinterested persons, living alongside one another with no clue as to what may be going on in such close proximity?

Kidnapped children in the house next door.  Bombs being made in the apartment that separates you from them by a single walls’ thinness.  Children being snatched from their mother’s arms (please read  “We Can Stop Him”)

I believe there are lessons in everything; I believe looking for the silver lining is worth it and I believe in hope.

There are 5,256,000 minutes in the span of ten years.  In each of those minutes, if there were just one small speck of hope, these three captives held onto it and survived by the very grace of it.  HOPE!

What are you hoping for; what are you waiting for?  Please don’t waste one precious minute; each is what gets you to the next. 

May none of us, any one we love, nor any one we will never even meet, ever be in a position where hope is lost forever.  To the mother of one of the captives who has gone on to the next world, I would tell her that the  hope of seeing her daughter again is what helped keep her daughter alive – for she hoped to see, too, and so , one day, hopefully, many days from this one,  you will. 

I hope.

Find your blessings

Is it just ME, or do you, too, try to find the up side of a situation and marvel at others who do it so generously?

I read a story this morning.  It told of a women recovering from 55 surgeries repairing the facial disfigurement inflicted upon her by her husband when he discovered her involvement with another man.

He beat her with a bat and doused her face with lye.  It ate through her flesh, into the muscles, the tendons, the bones.  The victim, herself a transplant nurse, must have known the journey she would be on to recovery; yet, she embarked upon it.

The sudden death of another woman made possible a full face transplant.

The daughter of the deceased donor had the opportunity to meet her mom’s beneficiary, who now looks like her mom.  In that experience, the daughter found the joy of being able to touch her mother’s face again, to feel her skin, to see her freckles.

The strength of the three woman in this story amaze me.  I imagined the donor must have expressed her willingness to donate organs, even her face, if and when, in her passing, the opportunity presented itself. 

   

The daughter had to bear the thought of what would be done to her mom’s remains in order for the transplant to be possible.

The victim/recipient had to bear the pain and suffering of the ordeal itself, the dozens of operations that followed, the emotional and psychological trauma, which may present the biggest challenge, and finding a way to move forward in her life, now blind.

I wonder as I have just written those words, if her blindness is God’s way of protecting her from what could be a lifetime of strangers’ stares because of her disfigurement, perhaps her inability to see herself.  Perhaps!

We live in cynical times.  A news broadcast cannot end without hearing of atrocities around the world or around the corner; sadly, they are everywhere.  The blessing is that strong, very strong women, like the three mentioned here, remind us of what is possible – good and bad  - and that how we deal with every moment is what gets us to the next and that the roles we are capable of playing in and for each other is often left to chance, to opportunity, to circumstance.

So, IS it just me, or do you, too wonder if you would have had the strength of any one of these women?

Count your blessings,

they are there.