Lost and Found

I was recently asked what my greatest shortcoming is.  Gosh, I don't know.  There are too many to choose from.  It's certainly hard to pick the "greatest" one.  I suppose the one that hinders my life the most is my absolute lack of navigational skills.  I can get lost anywhere, any time. 

My brain does not have the ability to comprehend a map.  Don't suggest I get a fancy thing for my car that says "Turn here."  I have a GPS system, but using it makes it worse. I have tried it. And I have ended up fifty freakin' miles away from my destination, thinking I had discovered some new lost city.

My brain does not remember things in order visually, so I can never rely on passing landmarks to tell me if I am close or far from my destination.  For instance, I've been driving to Gainesville via the Cleveland Highway at least once a week for the past decade, and even on that straight path, I cannot tell you what comes first, the Dairy Dip or the crossroads.  Seriously.

I get lost in buildings.  I get turned around easily.  I have no innate sense of east or west, north or south.  I forget where I have been, locationally speaking.

The first time I got lost in a building was when I was about six years old.  I was shopping with my mother and sisters at Lenox Square Mall, and mama let me play on the escalators by myself.  (Times were different back then, OK?  And I wasn't exactly the best child to shop with.  Shopping at a mall rates right up there with going to the beach, in my opinion, and anyone who knows me knows how I feel about that. She may have had plans all along to lose me, but whatever...)

So, she explained how I could go down one flight at Rich's, and then walk around to the other side and go up.  She'd be right there in the children's clothing section picking out all my lovely finery for the upcoming school year, that I would refuse to wear, because I only wore the same three outfits based on the fact that they felt soft and good.  The clothes she picked out were beautiful, and to me, beautiful meant itchy.  But whatever, she'd buy them any way, and then wait five years until my little sister could wear them.

The only store I liked was Chocolate Soup. They had these cute little jumper dresses that I could actually tolerate wearing because they went OVER clothes I already had, and plus, they sold puppets, and if I was good, I could buy one as my reward.

So, here I am, testing out my navigational skills at this tender age. I got completely lost. I have a vivid memory of the event, but I cannot figure out how to get from point A to point B, even now. I am serious. Do not take me to a department store. I still cannot figure out how to go down an escalator and get back up to the place I was before. It's like, in my head, it everything flip flops, and I can't decide if I have just ascended or descended.

Well never fear, because the story ends well. My mother was paged over the loud speaker. I had wandered far away, but at least I stayed in the store. A nice lady at the jewelry department helped me when I unashamedly pronounced that I was lost. She thought I was cute, and my mother beamed with pride when she came to claim me. She gushed about how smart I was to find a store employee to help me. I was rewarded for doing the right thing. No one ever said, "How could you get lost doing something so simple?"

It's no wonder why no one seemed surprised that I recently got really lost in a hospital. And I don't mean just lost, I mean the scary kind of lost, when I wound up in the bowels of the restricted hazmat area of Eastside Hospital, just trying to find the cafeteria to buy my husband some food while we said our goodbyes to his mother who was dying.  And I got locked in a construction zone. I could not escape.

See, I accidentally took the service elevator, instead of the visitors elevator. This is because all hallways look the same to me. I can never remember if I turn left or right. So, even though I had gone to the cafeteria before, each journey is refreshingly new to me. And it's not a memory problem. I was the oldest student in my psychology class, and I whopped everyone on the memory tests. I had the best darn memory in the class. I am a dean scholar, and have a 4.0 grade point average. I am not saying I am smart, but I have a great memory come exam time. And yet, I get lost trying to find my classroom to take the exam. Go figure.

Any way, so my mother-in-law is dying. Things aren't going well. I want to take a little walk to the cafeteria to get my husband some food. I take the totally wrong elevator. The doors shut, but the elevator does not move. I try to push the buttons, but it does not work. The sign says I need a key to operate the elevator. Oh, I don't have one. I panic.  I sit on the floor and cry a little bit. I pray. I am scared to press the red button. I don't want to set off an alarm. I figure someone will come use this elevator any minute.

After half an hour, no one comes. I break down an push the red button. Miraculously, a voice comes over the intercom. Ah, ha! I'll be free any minute now.

I explain that I got on the wrong elevator. The nice voice on the intercom says, "Do you see the button that says, 'OPEN DOOR'?

Oh. My. God.

The back of the elevator opens, not the front where I entered, but who cares, what's the difference? I exit. Only, I am now in a construction zone. I walk down a hall, and there are doors. But they do not open unless you push a code on the key pad.  I walk down another hall, and find another door, but that one has a key pad too. I push on the door, but it won't open.  I walk down another hall, and luckily I see a man.  I knock on a door and pitifully yelp, "Help."

He opens the door and says, "You are not supposed to be down here. This is a restricted area. I say, "I know. I got lost."  Only, this man is not as nice as the lady at the jewelry counter. My mom isn't there to say, "I am so proud of you, you did the right thing, bless your heart."  With this man, it was more like, "What the hell?"

He found someone to escort me to an exit. I felt like a criminal. They were looking at me quite suspiciously.  It was weird down there.  They had radioed security to report a fat, mildly retarded woman on the loose. They may have thought I was one of those nut jobs trying to steal a baby form the maternity ward. I kept explaining I was just trying to find the cafeteria.

They probably thought I was an escapee from a psychological evaluation in the emergency room. Or maybe they thought I was on the prowl for drugs. I don't know. I know I didn't look too good. I had been locked in the service elevator for 30 minutes, and had been going up and down locked hallways for fifteen minutes.  I was having a mild anxiety attack by this point.

I exited the building far away from where I started. I was on a whole other wing of this big ole hospital. I walked and walked until I saw the main entrance, I asked the lady behind the desk for directions to the cardiac unit, which was far away enough to drive to a completely different parking lot from that point. I hauled ass to the right unit, and on the way, I literally ran into a security guard who was talking on his radio, trying to find a lost crazy fat lady in the restricted area.  I turned on my heels and said, "Oh, that was me. No worries.  I am found now."  You should have seen the look on his face.

I finally made it back to my mother-in-law's bedside. My sister-in-law and my husband wanted to know what took so long, and I told them my story. And realizing, I had no food, I offered to take my husband's place, and I encouraged him to go get his own damn food.  Only, I said it real sweet.  'Cause his mama was dying.

I have trouble with directions and getting lost everywhere I go.  Luckily, I am married to a man who has amazing navigational skills.  My man knows his way around if you know what I mean.

He was a Boy Scout, and a soldier in the Army.  He can look at the sun and the stars and tell you how to get anywhere. When I have to take our children to the doctor in Atlanta, he knows that it does not matter if I've been there twenty times already, he knows he'll have to draw me a new "Abi- map" that will only make sense only to me, apparently, every single time.

And don't even get me started on my infamous trip to the corn maze when I took my small children on a fun adventure where we ended up stuck in the middle of a corn field for four hours, and the whole place CLOSED, leaving us stranded inside massive corn rows in the middle of the night, and me having to calm down my scared children as I tried to lead them to the promised land, all with one boob hanging out of my shirt so I could nurse my baby while I stomped over corn stalks, having to trail blaze our own exit for miles in the freezing cold.

Which brings me to the Celtic cross I wear, that symbolizes so much for just one little thing. It symbolizes the four directions, and it symbolizes heaven and earth, time and eternity, all things I will never fully understand.

But here's what I do understand: the focus of the cross is the centerpoint, the intersection of where it all comes together. For a Christian, the centerpoint is Jesus. It's no wonder that Jesus is called the Way. And  His Way is through LOVE. 

I may be a burden to those who have had to come to my rescue to lead me back home, but those experiences help remind me how good it feels to be found.  Love does that. Love finds us and brings us home. And that's the best feeling in the world.  And thank you Jesus for finding a lost soul like me. Amen.