Where are you?

 "Riley - where are you? Riley! Riley!" "We can't find her." "Where did you last see her?" These were the comments and shouts I heard just a few hours ago from a frantic momma and her friends. A 9 year old child had disappeared from the beach. Two police vehicles arrived driving right onto the sand. The police began to canvass up and down in front of the various condos. People spread out across the sand looking for Riley. The mother cried and walked the beach continually looking. I won't make you bear the suspense any longer. They found Riley. She had been walking with her friend on the beach and stopped to look at something while the friend kept walking. Riley didn't know which way to go and walked in the wrong direction - lost. Another mother down the beach saw Riley and asked her if she was lost. The mom told her that she was the mother of a 9 year old daughter and offered to help her find her way back to her family. After 45 minutes or so of sheer hell on earth, mother and daughter were reunited.

I didn't help canvass the beach. I didn't really know what the little girl looked like though I had watched her play in the pool not ten feet away. As others searched, I actually sat in my chair by the pool and started to pray -- for safety, for God's care, for peace and comfort. I would get up and pace on the pier and look up and down the beach . . .and I would pray.

When mother and daughter came walking back to the pool, I realized that I had witness a tiny segment of grace.

God is our heavenly parent who loves us so very much and he relentlessly pursues us. He searches us out. No matter how lost we are - no matter how far we walk in the wrong direction, He never gives up on us. God would go to the ends of the earth for us. Heck - he died on the cross for us.

The words from this song have been in my mind since the incident -- especially "it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the ninety-nine:
Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God
Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the ninety-nine
I couldn't earn it, and I don't deserve it, still, You give Yourself away
Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God, yeah

Y'all - God loves us. Earlier today, that momma was going to turn over every grain of sand on this big beach if she had to do so in order to find her girl. God loves us even more than that.

p.s. I'm going to TRY to write some this week while I'm letting my mind rest. Bear with me - my writing is very rusty. I should take a lesson from my friend, Brian. I should probably write and not publish every thought I have.