Dear Julie,
Thank you for being there—
For noticing her.
For caring.
For acting on her behalf.
For all your kindness and generosity.
Thank you for guarding her and returning
her to us!
We love her.
She is one of the great moms! Children were
her heart.
She was an elementary school teacher, and
she had six of us children at home as well.
She worked hard!
She was always ready for a party!
She scolded and spanked and worried.
She prayed.
And she would laugh until tears ran down
her cheeks.
She loved us!
We believe you were an agent of the Lord
Jesus, positioned to help her when she needed it.
Sincerely,
Christine Schat
She’s missing!
“What do you mean, she’s missing?” I clutched the phone to my ear.
My sister Carol was on the phone at 7 a.m. to tell me that our mother had been missing since 9 a.m. the previous day.
Mom. Our mother. Not yours, not my friend’s, not the one across the street. Mine.
I was in denial. It was unbelievable!
She was 78 years old, and she had dementia. Alzheimer’s. She was dependent on Dad for her physical care and her decision-making. My folks lived in a gated retirement community in Southern California—a wonderful place for them, in view of Mother’s disability. Here, she was given quite a bit of freedom to leave the house on her own without getting lost.
Or so we thought.
Her excitement for the day was to go—by herself—for walks around the blocks of her neighborhood. Because she was still very alert to the present (although five minutes previously escaped her), she could still drive to familiar, long-recognized places, such as church, which was one block outside the gate.
How could she be missing?
Over the phone, Carol and I prayed. “Lord, you know where Mother is. Please show us.”
Yesterday morning she left home to drive to the church for Bible Study and never returned. Dad was frantic! He filed a missing person’s report and was out during the day and night with our brother Ed, looking for her. We knew God’s hand was on her, but we wanted to get our hands on her as well. So, over the phone, Carol and I prayed. “Lord, you know where Mother is. Please show us.”
Do you believe your Lord will take care of you in any circumstance? Most of us have fears related to old age because we can become so vulnerable again, as we were when we were children. Dependency is one of those fears, as well as people taking advantage of our deficiencies, neglecting us, abusing us, stealing from us, abandoning us. We lose our interests, lose our abilities, lose our enthusiasm, lose our friends and lose our family members. Lose ourselves.
Alzheimer’s Disease is the big bugaboo. We wouldn’t even be able to get the wrongs corrected because we wouldn’t remember who hurt us or what they did—we’d just suffer. We wouldn’t remember where we belonged; we wouldn’t know how to get home. We would just be lost. Oh, Lord, help us.
“Oh, Lord, help our mother,” I breathed as I dialled my father’s number.
“Dad, this is Chris,” I said, and he burst into tears. Something about hearing the voice of his eldest child brought a rush of emotion.
“I just want my girl back,” he sobbed. Then he handed the phone to my brother.
“Chris, Ed here. I’ve been here with Dad since yesterday, and Jerry’s on his way over to help. We think Mom got confused and frightened and is sitting in her car somewhere, waiting to be found. We’ve been out looking—driving up and down and around the blocks yesterday and last night. So far, no luck.”
Julie
One hour later, Carol was on the phone again. “The police just called Dad. Some American woman named Julie, who is living in Mexico, called her sister in Los Angeles and said that there’s an elderly lady there from America. She’s disoriented but knows her name.”
Julie asked her sister to check with the American authorities regarding any missing persons fitting the description.
It was Mom.
Wow, Lord! That was fast! One hour?
She was in a small Mexican village, four hours south of the Mexican border. Six hours from her own home. She would’ve had to refuel the car; would’ve had to navigate the border crossing through border patrol; would’ve had to find her way through the maze of streets in Tijuana, a city of one million people just across the border from San Diego. No way! Not in her mental condition.
Dad was now in a new panic, mixed with his relief that she’d been located. Why was Mom in Mexico? Had someone kidnapped her? Did they want a ransom? Was she injured? Could he just drive down there and grab her? Would the Mexican authorities help? He knew nothing about her circumstances at this point, except that she’d been located.
A phone call to Julie, the American lady in Mexico, brought some more information. Mom had been found in Mexico, sitting in her car by the side of the road, and was taken by this dear lady to a local Catholic mission in Mexico where she spent the night and had a “lovely time talking about Jesus with the nuns”. He—JESUS—was her favorite subject, even with her advanced dementia, so I knew that she felt comfortable and safe despite being in unfamiliar surroundings.
Julie returned to the mission to take Mom out for a bite of breakfast and keep her company for a while, and see if she could ascertain any more information about Mother—where she lived, her phone number, a destination—anything. Nope. Nothing. So Julie was prompted to call her sister in America and have her check for a missing person’s report based on Mom’s name.
Help from God and humankind
We’d been praying and, of course, God had a plan. In San Diego, California, lived another committed person of God. He was a retired contractor with a private plane emblazoned with the words Flying for Jesus. And he meant it. He’d climb into the cockpit and fly out of the United States into Mexico, wherever he was needed, to take supplies to remote villages, transport someone in need of medical care or pick up stranded people.
He heard about our mother and called Dad. “I’ll pick up your wife. Meet me at the San Diego airport in two hours.”
“We’ll be there.”
I cry thinking about it, even now.
When Mother stepped out of the airplane onto the tarmac, my brother Jerry reached for her hand: “Mom.”
“How nice of you to come and meet me,” she said to him, just as if there’d been no crisis, just as if no one should’ve been worried, just as if she were returning from a nice holiday. Just as if everything was perfectly normal.
She was returned to us within 36 hours of disappearing. It took more than a year to get the car back. God has his priorities. Smile.
“And now, the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would say. The only acknowledgment Mother ever made that she’d had some trouble took place about a year later, during a visit my sister and I made to our parents’ home. We were waiting with her in the car while Dad went into a store. Since it was a warm day, I rolled down the windows, and since that didn’t provide enough ventilation, I opened a door. That made her visibly nervous, and she asked for it to be closed.
“It’s OK, Mom,” I joked. “Nobody’s going to want to bother three old ladies.”
She replied, seriously, “Sometimes they just want the car.”
That’s as close as we ever came to knowing what happened to her that day.
Of course, Dad confiscated her car keys.
Author Christine Schat is a UCLA graduate and the former owner of Fort Bragg Bakery. She loves to smile, laugh and share her stories. She currently lives in Southern California but loves to travel the country visiting family and friends. She is especially fond of her grandchildren and has been nicknamed Gram-cracker. But her greatest joy is experiencing God’s answered prayers.
Excerpted from the book The Tree of Faith: God Wants to Answer YOUR Prayer. Copyright ©2021 by C J Schat. Printed with permission from Wealth Through Stories—wealththroughstories.com.
image 1: Wikimedia Commons; image 2: Ken Lund
