Hope

I was so inspired last week by the story of the young woman who suspected that she was a missing person. She checked it out and found out that she had been stolen as a baby. She and her birth family have been reunited.
Some of us remember the case very well. The newborn was removed from the maternity ward by a woman dressed as hospital personnel. It shocked the nation!! Believe it or not, prior to this episode, newborn wings were open to anyone. Whenever visiting people in the hospital, I would always go look at the babies. It brought such joy!
This case also violated the sense of safety we all felt about hospitals. Suddenly, the unthinkable became thinkable. It was this case that started the hospital lockdown procedures that we are all accustomed to today.
Our hearts broke as we watched the young mother plea for her daughter’s return. We wept as we held our own little ones and tried to imagine the horror she was going thru. We, as a nation, prayed for the safe return of the beautiful 3 day old girl.
Those prayers were answered! Not when she was still an infant as we had all hoped but as a grown young woman. It satisfies my sense of justice that the case that so changed the country should do so again! When she was stolen, it was an unheard of act. When she returned, it was also an almost unheard of act. Few of our missing children are actually ever found.
How much hope that brings to the world!!! Parents of missing children all over the world can grab hold of this and continue to hope that their family, too, will be reunited one day! This ray of hope’s light will keep them going for a little longer.
It brings hope to the rest of us as well. We all have some secret heartbreak that we carry with us. We all have something that went wrong that we want to be made right. This story said to me, “Be patient, it will happen.”
It’s also a happy ending and we can’t have too many of those, can we? That’s the view from my side of the street, what’s yours?