“Stop the car, Howard!” I cried, “That looks like a lost child!” We had just let our visiting daughter and her kids out at Walmart and were planning to circle or park, when I saw the little girl with a panicky, terrified expression on her face standing on the curb at the front of the store. She was crying, and no one was noticing, though several shoppers were coming out around her.
Releasing my seatbelt, I jumped out of the car almost without thinking.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked as I touched her shoulder.
“I lost my daddy! I lost my daddy!” she sobbed. I asked her what he looked like, and the color of his hair. Looking around, the only man I saw was of another race walking across the parking lot.
“Let’s go in and find your daddy!” I said as I took her hand. She wasn’t much over four years old.
“Not my daddy! My granny!” she clarified fervently. I told her we would go in to the “office” and they would find her granny. She calmed and trustingly held my hand as we entered the store.
“I have a lost child,” I said to the first employee I saw, a greeter. He looked very flustered, but told me to take her to customer service. Suddenly that seemed far away as I hurried past a bank, a money center, and maybe a game room. My heart was moved at the thought of this little child, maybe the age of my next-youngest granddaughter, innocently depending on a complete stranger to take her to safety.
Just as we entered the customer service area, an elderly woman standing at the counter turned around from her shopping cart and said, “Why, there she is right now!” as the little girl buried her face against the woman’s skirts. “She was just here a minute ago!” the woman exclaimed. Evidently she hadn’t realized right away that the child was missing, because she’d had time to get outside where I found her looking searchingly over the parking lot.
The clerk came around from around the counter, and in a lecturing tone, said, “Now if that ever happens again, you must come right to this area,” she told the little girl. And how would she find this area? I thought, putting myself in her place, less than 40 inches tall, unable to read, her thoughts a jumbled confusion in the crush of shoppers and bright lights?
I was just glad I had seen her. Anything might have happened to her, from stepping in front of a car to going with the wrong person. Thank you, God, that I hadn’t gone into the store with my daughter, that we hadn’t gone to Walmart earlier as we had planned, but I was, in this small window of time, able to save a little one from possible harm. It felt good to be part of something that I have no doubt was divinely orchestrated.
Thelma,
ReplyDeleteThis certainly was a divine appointment, thank God you were there for her!
And, every day I not only pray for God to give His angels charge over our family and loved ones...but I also ask Him to place divinely appointed people in their paths.
What a blessing to read this and know that this little child is safe!