pocket knives, motorcycles and a prophetic t-shirt

Spiritual resource to share: tenacity in prayer

A peninsula somewhere in the Sylvania Wilderness Area

Well, we had a pretty major adventure this last weekend - a metaphysical workout, a prayer extravaganza.

Here's the scoop: Saturday afternoon, our son started out for a run in the woods by his school, wearing shorts and a hoodie. He got off trail and ultimately lost. When night started closing in, he found a peninsula on the other side of a lake, swam to it, made a lean-to and waited out the night. At day break, he heard the faint hum of motorcycles and walked toward the sound until he hit a road. From there he hitch-hiked to the nearest place with a telephone (a resort ten miles away from campus) and phoned home about 8:30 am.

When my husband and I were first notified that our son was missing, Rick was at home and I was 4 hours away. After the call, I started reasoning: I knew the night was cold - down to about 40 degrees. There are occassional wolf sightings reported in that area as well as black bear, coyote and bobcat. The 1300 acre campus is surrounded by thousands more acres of wilderness. The terrain is beautiful - a fact that mattered very little to me at that time - filled with lakes, swamp and thorny brush - a fact that mattered a lot to me. I also knew that I had a four hour drive home and then another hour drive up to the school. I knew all that time would be spent in prayer.

To me, prayer is a very active mental state in which I literally talk to God at times, listen for inspiration, wrestle with fear and hold to a standard that I believe Christ Jesus taught: that God is love and constantly guards, guides and protects us. God, to me, is not a glorified human, but a power that is omnipotent, omnipresent and is the source of all intelligence and the source of our lives. Understanding that harmony and protection have divine authority has helped me to bring these qualities into experience time and time again.

When I first got in the car to head home in the middle of the night, it occurred to me that I was all set to go. The night before, I had gone to bed uncommonly early, had filled the gas tank and bought all kinds of goodies and drinks to take back with me. In fact, even a bag of veggies chips was half-opened and tilted toward me. It struck me that everything I needed, to the littlest detail, was right there. A small thing perhaps, but it was part of a larger law: "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need." If this was my experience now, it was my son's experience now as well.

I don't think the school could have done much more in its search. As soon as it was determined that he was not on campus, community and state officials were called in. My husband left to join one of the search parties. By now, Micah had been missing for well over 14 hours. I was receiving updates and support from the school and from family and friends every half hour on my drive up.

After a few hours of hearing updates, but no Micah, I got flat out scared. Holding back sobs, I just, well, literally cried out to God "Where is he?" And the answer came, quicker than I could end my question, "He's with me." This comforted me, and I knew that if I could feel this comfort, so could Micah.

Now this may seem odd to some, but I wanted to talk to Micah, so I did. In my thought and sometimes outloud, I told him what I wanted him to hear. I wanted to feel his presence and I did. "The intercommunication is always between God and man" and I feel that my needs were being met through God in a way that I could handle and make sense of. If my needs could be met in this way, I knew that Micah's needs could be met in a way that he could understand and handle.

A friend called who was praying with me. "Life is irresistable," she said. Of course, I thought. We are not swinging from fear to hope, from death to life from lost to found. Life is right now, complete and entire. Found is our natural state as we are never out of God's care. And love, a presence that can be felt anywhere and anytime, has no room for fear.

I trusted that Micah knew what to do and when to do it, that he has the presence of Mind (another word for God) to listen and act wisely. Micah is never separated from God - who is good, loving and protecting. And Micah would be led in the way that would keep him safe and protected. He could not resist doing the right thing! Knowing this broke that hypnotic hold of fear.

Well, once we were finally reunited, more of his story came out. He had found a pocketknife while walking. This pocketknife was complete with case, and included a saw, knife, screwdriver, scissors, etc. ("Oh, this is so God!" said a friend when she heard this.) This helped him build a lean-to. Building on a peninsula helped protect him from any wildlife. "Oh yeah," he said in answer to a question about wildlife encountered, "the coyotes were far enough away to be interesting."

Hordes of motorcyles groups pass through this area during this time of the year. I usually find this annoying, but now I'm pretty grateful to them - especially to that group who were noisy enough that early morning for Micah to hear their hum and head off to that road.

Our son said he was never afraid, sang all the songs he knew, and used the outdoor skills taught him by many of his teachers at the school. It was his own kind of vision quest, his own rendition of weekend Survivor and will now be a part of the school's legendary stories. The shock, swelling, cramping, infection, and fever predicted to happen never got a foothold in our son’s thought and he experienced none of it.

Now for something really funny. When Rick and others got the word that Micah was okay and found out where he needed to be picked up, he and another staff member went to his room to get him some warm clothes: long pants, thick socks, a fleece jacket. And then Rick pulled out of the drawer a long sleeved t-shirt. On it, it read "I have taken the road less traveled.......now where the hell am I?" Micah wore it back to campus with a huge smile.











Sylvania Wilderness Area. Photo taken on Clark Lake by H.G. Judd, June 2006.

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