Sarah, Please Come Home

By Janet M. Seever

   Cheryl was rudely awakened. It took a minute before the persistent ringing registered in her sleep-fogged brain. Slipping on her bathrobe, she glanced at the lighted digital clock at her bedside - 1:25 am.

       Who on earth is ringing the doorbell at this hour? she wondered. Fear flooded over her, but she decided to let her husband Rick sleep. He had put in a difficult day as a paramedic and would be doing another shift in the morning.

       When she reached the kitchen, she peered out the window. Flashing lights from a police car!

       Cheryl opened the door slowly, coming face to face with the officer. The June night air was cool in Calgary, and she shivered, muscles tense.

       "Mrs. Anderson," he confronted her directly. "We have your daughter and two of her friends in the squad car."

       "There must be some mistake," she responded, her heart racing. "Sarah and her friends are having a sleepover in our basement. They were watching a video and eating popcorn when my husband and I went to bed."

       "Apparently they had something to drink along with their popcorn," the officer continued, "because they are quite drunk. We caught them ringing doorbells a couple blocks from here after someone phoned 911."

       "I don't understand. We don't even have alcohol in the house." Things like this don't happen to Christian families - do they? she thought.

       "Teenagers are quite ingenious at finding alcohol if they want it," the policeman added a bit more kindly. "We can release her into your custody since this is her first offence, or we can hold her at the precinct overnight. The choice is yours."

       "She can come home," Cheryl answered numbly.

       That was the just the beginning. Soon Cheryl noticed other changes in their once vibrant and cooperative 16-year-old. Grades began slipping. Although Sarah had made a commitment to the Lord as a youngster, she now refused to go church. An empty cigarette packet showed up in the pocket of her jacket. Every conversation seemed to end in an argument.

       This room looks like a pig sty, thought Cheryl one day, as she shoved Sarah's door open and nearly tripped over clothing strewn across the floor. As she set a stack of clean clothes on Sarah's bed, her foot bumped something hard behind a pile of magazines under the bed. Shock spread through her as she picked up an empty rum bottle.

       Discipline didn't work. It was as if Sarah dared them to punish her - the more the better. Too bad she's not more like Paul, thought Cheryl in anguish. Their 19-year-old son Paul, who had never given them any trouble, was studying at a Bible college in Edmonton.

       Things came to a crisis in September. One Friday night Sarah said she was going to visit some friends. When she came home hours after her curfew, it was obvious she had been drinking.

       The next morning Rick angrily confronted her. "No drinking, Sarah! We already told you that. If you live in our house, young lady, you'll live by our rules."

       Sarah swore softly under her breath. "Then I'm out of here." With that she stomped into her room and threw a few of her belongings into a backpack.

       "Don't bother looking for me. I don't live here anymore!" she shouted as she ran to the door. "I hate this family, I hate everything you stand for!" The door slammed loudly behind her.

       Cheryl and Rick stood there in shock.

       She won't go very far, they reasoned, especially since she has almost no money. It was such a spur-of-the-moment decision. When she hadn't returned by evening, Cheryl began calling a list of Sarah's friends - at least the ones for whom she had numbers. No one knew where she was, or if they did, they weren't telling.

       The next day Rick and Cheryl went to the police station. When the officer finished filling out the form, he turned to them. "Abduction cases are different. We deal with them. Your daughter is a runaway. If we searched for every runaway here in Calgary, we'd have no time to do anything else. But if we do happen to see her, we'll let you know."

       On that somber note their Sarah became a number in a police file, a statistic. One more runaway.

       That night Cheryl sobbed as Rick held her in his arms. "We've got to remember that the Lord loves her even more than we do," he said. "This hasn't caught Him by surprise. He knows exactly where she is, even if we don't. We have to learn to trust Him." But trusting was easier said than done.

       Days passed, and she didn't come back. They called her friends again. Together Rick and Cheryl visited several shelters that housed the homeless and showed the staff Sarah's photo. No one had seen her.

       Early one morning Rick was on duty when his ambulance answered a 911 call to pick up an assault victim in the downtown area. The young blonde girl -about Sarah's age and height - had been badly beaten. Was she a prostitute? Had she been living on the street? Rick was ashen as he turned away from the sight, and fought for control. Thank God it wasn't Sarah - but it might have been.

       They finally located one of Sarah's friends who had talked with Sarah recently. They marked the date on the calendar.

       Sometimes Cheryl felt angry, sometimes numb; at other times fear was a lion, crouching in the corner, ready to pounce on her and devour her.

       One sunny October afternoon Cheryl walked to her special place of refuge in a park two blocks from her home. It was a favorite family picnic place when Sarah and Paul were younger. She could still visualize the children floating boats down the shallow creek that ran along the edge of the park. But those carefree days were gone forever.

       Today Cheryl came to think and to pray. Sitting on a bench near the creek, she watched golden autumn leaves drop one by one into the gurgling water and float away. If only she could drop her problems one by one into the creek and let them float away like the leaves. She noticed geese honking overhead, flying in their familiar V formation. They know which way to fly for the winter, she thought. Too bad my daughter doesn't have the same homing instinct.

       "Lord," she began to pray. "We miss Sarah so much." Somewhere in the midst of her prayer, she switched to asking "Why?" She thought of Sarah, their lovely daughter with long blonde hair. The Sarah who was everyone's friend. What had changed all of this? It was a time of soul-searching. Was there something they could have done differently? Where had they gone wrong?

       But God was silent, and that silence was deafening.

       She and Rick noticed some of their friends subtly avoided them. Are they afraid that having a runaway child is contagious? Cheryl wondered angrily.

       The hardest blow came when Carol, a person she regarded as her friend, quoted Scripture to her at church and said self-righteously, "You brought this on yourself, Cheryl. You should have taken Sarah out of that school when you knew the kind of friends she was making and the influence they had on her." Cheryl was shocked - and then she realized how smug she herself had been in the past, comparing her good children with others who were rebellious.

       The friends who helped the most were the ones who let her cry, and listened. They told her they were praying for her. Compassion, that's what they had.

       Her thoughts drifted to Sarah constantly, making it difficult to concentrate on her secretarial job. Where was Sarah living? What was she doing? She probably wasn't working, because all of her previous experience was babysitting jobs. Is she a prostitute? Does she have AIDS? Is she pregnant? On drugs?

       At one time Cheryl might have rejected a pregnant daughter, but now she knew she would welcome her home with open arms, no matter what. She was learning about grace - God's grace, and it was such a painful lesson.

       Just before Christmas, the phone rang, and Cheryl's heart raced as she heard a familiar voice.

       "Mom, it's me. I'm fine." She blurted the words out, as if she were afraid of losing her courage.

       "Honey, please come home," Cheryl begged. "We love you. Are you well?"

       "I already told you I'm fine." Sarah sounded defensive.

       "Where are you living?" Cheryl instinctively knew she had ventured too far.

       "Bye," was the abrupt response, and the phone went dead. Cheryl was disappointed, but had one more date to mark on her calendar.

       Sarah's unopened Christmas presents stayed under the Christmas tree until Cheryl took the tree down, and then she put them away in a closet. This was the saddest Christmas she could remember.

       The door of Sarah's room remained shut, but a couple times Cheryl ventured in and sat on the bed, thinking and praying. She could see Sarah's navy blue school sports sweatshirt hanging in the closet. Sarah had been so proud of it. She had been on the swim team and had gone out for track. Several of her sports medals hung on her bulletin board along with an honors certificate for a science project.

       "We did everything we could to help her get ahead," Cheryl whispered as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "She had so much potential. Now she's thrown it all away." Then the thought struck her, Did we ever ask Sarah what she wanted to do with her life? Did we ever really listen to her? Or were we too busy giving advice?

       The months slipped by and the days grew longer. Cheryl was learning to trust, even though she couldn't see the results. Finding Sarah was no longer an all-consuming passion. A few more people had seen her and talked with her, which confirmed Sarah was still alive and in the city.

       The lingering depression Cheryl felt gradually lifted and renewed hope came to her heart. She was learning to trust her Lord in a way she had never done before. Sarah was in His hands, and so was she.

       One Saturday in April the trees were beginning to bud and the bright sun was shrinking the last remaining snowdrifts. A damp, earthy smell filled the air as Cheryl noticed tulips poking their sleepy heads up through the soil in her garden. The spell of the long, harsh winter had been broken.

       It was too beautiful of a day to waste in the house. She put on a jacket, took the Luci Shaw book of poetry she had been reading, and walked down to her favorite place in the park. As she settled herself on the bench, she could see birds were flitting from branch to branch, filling the air with their joyful warbling. Pussy willows along the creek were budding, and the Rocky Mountains in the distance were still wearing their winter coat of white. Easter was a week away, and a week beyond that was Sarah's 17th birthday.

       She thanked God for the beauty of the day, and opened her book. A feeling of peace settled over her as she began to read.

       Suddenly, she heard a squish of soggy dead leaves behind the park bench. Startled, Cheryl whirled around to see where the sound had come from and found herself face to face with Sarah. Her greasy blond hair hung limply around her shoulders, and she was thinner than last fall.

       "Dad said I would find you here," Sarah mumbled with eyes down cast as she shifted the backpack on her shoulder. "I miss the old times. I want to come home."

       Emotion welled up within Cheryl, but she stifled the impulse to jump up and hug this stranger. There would be time for that later.

       "Welcome home," she said gently.

©2000 by Janet Seever