LOST AND FOUND

During my first year of being a photographer, I got hired to document a wedding half way between Ottawa and Montreal. It was the middle of September by this time. The days had begun to get shorter…the nights had begun to get colder…and I was now four months pregnant with our son. After close to ten hours of shooting , it was very late in the night when I finally headed home. The sky was black…the gravel roads winding through the rural area were completely empty…and a thick fog had descended upon everything. In a nutshell, I was driving through a Stephen King novel!! The instructions seemed pretty simple at the time. Just a few turns would take me to the highway and an hour later, I would be back in Ottawa. I had them written down…printed off …etched them to memory.

But somehow, in all of this simplicity, I got lost. I felt like every turn I made, was the same one I had just taken five minutes earlier. I was surrounded by dark forests, completely vacant roads and not a single distinguishable landmark in sight. I eventually pulled over on the side of the road to double check my directions and all the while, the only cell phone we had at the time was sitting on my desk back home with a dead battery.

And that’s when it happened. That’s when the car died.

Completely. Out of nowhere. Nothing worked.

I sat in the driver’s seat, barely able to see ten feet in front of me through the fog, while every element of my vehicle just shut down. I was lost. Really lost. I had no idea where I was…no idea where to go…and furthermore, no idea how I got there.

First, I panicked. Then, I cried. Finally, I just got out and walked.

I walked through the cold…through the fog…through the darkness and eventually, I found a house. A tiny little house with an older couple doing their dishes in the middle of the night. When the man answered the door, I fell into a pile of tears on his front porch.

I was found.

The more I get to know God, the more I think He works this way a lot in our lives. He watches us spend our days constantly making wrong turns…constantly going in the wrong direction…and often times, losing sight of where we’re going. Losing sight of everything around us for that matter. And so, God steps in and takes action. He brings us to a complete halt on the side of the road and forces us to consider a different option.

Something that I’ve been struggling with a lot lately is fear; fear of the unknown…fear of failure…fear of disappointing the people that believe in me so much. And fear causes me to lose direction…it causes me to lose sight of where I want to go. Fear becomes the failing car…the dense fog…and the endless road I need to walk ahead. Fear stops me from moving forward. And honestly, in the depths of my fear, there are times when the idea staying in one place seems very appealing. Because it’s cold and scary and dark out there. And at least here – in the driver’s seat of a useless car – I can cry without anyone seeing me.

But I feel like God has been calling me out on this lately. That He’s begun showing me the glitches in my system…the frailty of such logic. I feel like God is tired of watching me lose my direction. So I feel like He’s pulled me over on the side of the road to say “Gen…this isn’t working. It’s time to get out and walk. I know it’s dark. I know it’s scary. But you’ve got places to go…and you’re not going to get there by just sitting here…”

Back when I was stranded, I remember that first moment of deciding to get out of the car to be the hardest. It’s scary when you have no idea what lies ahead. It’s scary when nothing is clear. It’s scary when you don’t know where you’re going.

But as I write this, it occurs to me that I haven’t yet told you the most beautiful part of my story…

So, this amazing couple – these strangers – took me into their home to get warm, finish crying and make some phone calls. And once I had found a tow truck to take me back to the city…we piled into the couple’s car to head back down the long, dark dirt road in an attempt to find my own. About four kilometers away, there it was…slightly slanted in the ditch…dew starting to collect over the surface. It seemed strange to look at it from the warmth of another vehicle knowing how scared I had been just a couple of hours before.

We parked in front of my car, settling in for the potentially long wait as the tow truck tried to find us. The couple decided to take a quick look at the engine and battery to see if we could get it started in the meantime and just like that, within seconds, the car started. Perfectly. As though nothing had ever happened. I stood there on the road, my own headlights blinding my vision, feeling half relieved and half furious all at the same time. What the heck had happened? How did I end up here – on a dirt road in the middle of the night – because of a car that apparently wasn’t broken at all??

In retrospect, I know exactly what happened…

God saw me getting lost in the darkness. With every wrong turn, I was getting deeper into the forest. Farther away from where I wanted to go. Further from help…further from home…further and further from being found. So He stopped me in my tracks. Because sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re lost. And other times, we know we’re lost, but we just don’t realize how lost we really are. We mean well. We want to go in the right direction. But all the turns seem the same. They all seem headed in the same direction.

Nowhere.

Once my car started working, we called to cancel the tow truck and the estimated two hour wait that came with it. But the new challenge was that I still didn’t know where I was. It’s hard to get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re starting. My new friends did though. They knew where we were…because they had never left. They had been there all along, so they knew exactly where I needed to go. But they also felt that I had been through enough for one night and that I had spent enough time alone in the dark. So they led the way. The guided me all the way back to Ottawa. To my front door. To my husband. To safety.

First they found me. Then they took me home.

And that is so often how God works. He lets you walk through the dark so that you can fall on your knees and ultimately, be shown the way. The way to our dreams…the way to our great love…the way to becoming the very best version of ourselves.

I know there might be some of us out there who need to get out of the car right now…some of us who might need venture into the darkness…some of us who are scared of what might be out there.

So, let’s go.

Let’s let ourselves be found again…

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  1. Kris Ryan says:

    Lovely.

  2. Kris Ryan says:

    Lovely.

  3. Jessica Hudson Reece says:

    Gen, your writing is incredible. Such amazing wisdom and truth. Thank you!

  4. Holly Trainor says:

    wonderful, heart warming and truth…God works in mysterious ways

  5. Karen-Ann says:

    This is beautiful! Amazing grace. How sweet it is.

  6. Karen-Ann Jane Harrison says:

    This is beautiful. Amazing grace how sweet it is. xo

6 Comments on LOST AND FOUND

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