This is a story about Lydia. The tiny cold girl who knocked on my car window this morning.
But let me back up to last night.
Last night I stayed up very very late with Samantha helping with her homework. Granted, it was fun homework. She had been asked to view commercials and identify the logical fallacies the advertisers use to sway us. It was a wonderful chance to introduce her all the classics, Have a Coke and a Smile, the Darth Vader kid in the Passat commercial, Old Spice hot guy on a horse, etc. We were up laughing and analyzing late, late, late. In addition to having stayed up late, I'm doing a juice cleanse to rid myself of toxins that have inevitable built up in my body from years and years of medications. Today is Day 9 and last night after a full day running on juiced vegetables and fruit, I was a little run down.
So I consoled myself in the fact that Lars would be doing the morning shuttling at 6 am.
But to my surprise, Lars was not actually there when I finally got my old tired self to bed; instead after sleeping for two hours, he was awakened by a call from work and stayed up from 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM fixing an outage. (Side note: Lars is on vacation until Monday. This better not be a pattern.)
Dreams of sleeping in dashed, I got up with Joshua at 5:45 to drop him off for band practice.
Normally, I would have been dressed to work out, dropped Josh off and quickly parked so I could go walk around the track. But I had just thrown on my coat this morning, almost didn't wear shoes when I couldn't find them in my mental fog, and drove to the high school on sleepy auto-pilot.
Stopping at the curb so Josh could unload his luggage (seriously, who needs to play three different instruments in three different bands?), we thought to pray. Josh often misses morning family prayer between band practice and seminary in the mornings and about 80% of the time, Josh and I take time to pray together before he heads out into big, bad high school.
Then our prayer was interrupted with a knock, knock, knock. On the window. I think we were both startled to look up to see a little girl's face at the window, eyes very wide and scared. Josh rolled down the window and she said, in a wobbly-trying-not-to-cry voice, "I was dropped off here to basketball practice...and I didn't realize they weren't having practice...and can I use your phone to call my mom?"
She was shivering and cold and I was amazed at her confidence to come knock on the window. Turns out she was actually 11 years old, but looked much younger than that and had zero body fat to insulate her from the freezing morning in her little basketball shorts.
I wondered if she had seen other people come and go in the parking lot, dropping off to band or coming to use the track. I imagine that she didn't know what to do at some point. Maybe
she said a prayer and wondered what to do and who to ask for help. Maybe she had waited until she felt safe, or the spirit whispered her next move.
And then she saw up praying and didn't even wait for the amen. : )
I knew I was going to invite her into my car to get warm regardless, little shivering thing that she was, so I offered, "Do you want me to just drive you home? I only offer that because you don't look like a dangerous person." She smiled a little bit, almost let a tear slide out of the little puddle her eyes were swimming in, quickly got in the car, said goodbye to Josh, and we headed to Lydia's house.
As we chit-chatted for the few minutes up the hill to her house, I thought about Lydias that I know. I have a beautiful, sweet niece, Lydia. I have an ancestor, Lydia. My ancestor Lydia was also really brave, was in a bind, and was delivered. You can read her story
HERE.
I wanted to share the story of my ancestor Lydia with my new little charge, but my heart was full already from being involved in the rescue and I didn't think I could get through it without crying myself, and she was already doing such an awesome job NOT crying. So, I didn't share the story. Maybe I will get share it with her some day.
As we drove I was grateful for a lot of things.
I was grateful that I had just thrown my coat on and left instead of dressing for my workout because that meant we got there sooner.
I was grateful that I was too tired to workout (after staying up late with Samantha) because that meant we were on the curb where Lydia found us instead of further in the parking lot.
I was grateful that I was the one taking Josh that morning. If Lars hadn't got the call from work, he would have been the one driving. I'm not sure that Lydia would have picked Lars, safe though he was, and even if she did, Lars wouldn't have felt it appropriate to be alone with her in the car.
I was grateful that we had decided to pray. I think that probably sealed the deal for Lydia.
I was grateful that Lydia had the confidence to come and knock on a window and ask for help. She had waited about 10 minutes in the cold. When I got home I looked at the temperature and grabbed a screen shot for you:
I know that Heavenly Father knows the details of our lives. He cares when we are out in the cold. He DOES send help when we ask for it. But help doesn't always come as fast as we think it should. Sometimes it takes awhile for the helper to get the message, sometimes the helpee doesn't think to pray, or is waiting for Divine Help when a perfectly warm car pulls up...and then drives off. But sometimes he stacks the clues in our favor, the help is given and received, and those involved feel a little piece of heaven. Yeah. It was kinda like that.
