Wednesday, June 29, 2011

An Inescapable Memory

The highway signs tonight say "Missing elderly, Dallas, TX," along with the license number of a silver Lexus.  This brought a memory flooding back over me. 

One Saturday morning I asked Jack to drive to the Lake Arlington branch of Arlington National Bank for me.  He took Charleigh-Girl along.  Suddenly I realized way too much time had elapsed, and they weren't home.  I called his cell phone and heard it ringing in our bedroom.  Jack had been a person who NEVER forgot his cell phone, but he had this time.  Panic overtook me immediately.  I didn't know what to do.  I didn't know where to begin to look, and I hated to leave home in case they did manage to return.

I'm afraid it was as long as an hour, but the phone finally rang.  It was Jack.  I can hardly even type this without crying.  Such a heart-breaking voice saying, "I'm lost."  He told me he was at a pay phone, but he had no idea where it was.  I asked him what he could see from where he was, and he was able to tell me very little.  I don't know how I figured it out, but I did, told him to sit tight until I got there, and drove right to them.

Jack and Charleigh-Girl were about the most pitiful sight I have ever seen.  They were sitting in his car at the SW corner of the Mansfield Highway and Loop 820 in the large parking lot of a service station.  This is a corner at which Jack had stopped hundreds of times in sixteen years of traveling from our home in Meadowbrook to his office in Kennedale.  There is hardly a corner with which he should have been more familiar.  It is also within sight of the Forest Hill city limits where he grew up.

The amazing thing was that he either remembered our phone number or was able to look it up on a card he carried in his pocket, and that he was able to dial it.

I have no idea how he got to this location.  He just as easily could have driven miles away and ended up on one of those signs.  This is yet another instance of God's blessing and protection.

No comments:

Post a Comment