Learning to Trust: ‘Lost Until the Light Comes’
Chris is Hiding from the Wolf in the Tree Hollow
In my book ‘Lost Until the Light Comes’, 6-year-old Chris finds himself in a very dangerous situation. He is running away from a wolf. It’s a really terrifying situation to be in for an adult, let alone a child. The advice that I would give any Christian in a similar situation is to pray – an ‘arrow prayer’ of “Help!” directed to God is sometimes all we can manage. But that’s enough. In my story, this is all it takes to bring God’s help rushing in.
An Answer to Prayer
This is what I want to convey to children. That no matter the circumstances the best thing to do is always to pray. Let me give you an example of something that happened to me. I was at the World Youth Day in Germany in 2005 (I was actually 44 years old at the time!) and was in a huge field somewhere in Cologne with thousands of young people. It the closing ceremony after the mass. It suddenly occurred to the group of friends that I had come with that we might miss our flight home! So, we scampered across the field and waited along a nearby road for the coach to collect us. The men from our prayer group decided to go and look for where the coach was - in case it was waiting farther along the road than we had anticipated. And we ladies stayed in one spot and prayed. Meanwhile more and more pilgrims were arriving to be collected by the coaches that had been arranged to collect us all. There were so many people. My fear was that others would get on the coaches first and we would be left.
Shortly after we arrived, one coach drew up much farther down the road, it loaded up with pilgrims and then left. It looked like we were waiting in the wrong spot. Time was passing and we were now seriously close to missing our flight..
Then after about 10 mins a coach came and stopped right in front of us…and just as the guys were returning from their unsuccessful search. Needless to say, that we caught our flight back to England. Feverish activity didn’t help – but prayer absolutely did!
God is always calling us into situations where we have to deepen our trust and faith in Him. I hope that children who listen to this story will see the reality of deeply trusting in God when life is tough and my hope is that it will also be a comfort to them.
