The song they sang in the woods

One · What happened

Two days in the woods of Lawrence County

Roman Heilman, six years old and autistic, was found alive in the woods of eastern Kentucky about two days after he was last seen, CBS News reported on Wednesday evening. On Sunday afternoon he was in a plaid green jacket and Crocs near his home in Louisa. Travis Hughes, who directs emergency management in Lawrence County, told CBS that the boy was known to play outside and explore the woods. The boy’s dog was believed to have gone with him, Hughes said. The report said it was not yet clear how he first went missing or who reported it.

Volunteers on foot and horseback, more than three hundred of them, searched the wooded ground around the clock, the report said. Kentucky State Police and the Kentucky National Guard joined them, along with search-and-rescue crews from West Virginia and Ohio. Helicopters and drones flew over the trees. Searchers found a muddy footprint that led to the boy’s clothes, Hughes said. The clothes told the team how exposed he was and that rain was moving in. Volunteers were asked to sing one of Roman’s favorite songs, “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” in the hope that he would hear it and come toward the sound.

Roman came out of the brush on Tuesday morning, about a mile and a half from home, right behind his dog and covered in scratches. Hughes said the boy pointed to the horses and said “E-I-E-I O.” A rescue team wrapped him in a blanket and fed him, and officials said on Wednesday that he was recovering from dehydration at a hospital in the area. Hughes wrote in a social media post that so many people had stepped forward that “we had to ask additional volunteers to hold off while we organized the resources we already had.”

Two · What it is doing

What a stranger’s missing child does to a reader

You read the story on your phone while the bath runs. By the second paragraph you have walked your own back yard out to the tree line and stood there looking at the ground for a small footprint. A six-year-old in a green jacket and Crocs is in the woods with rain coming. The sentence that reports him found also reports him gone for two days. You count your children before you finish the story, and a second count follows although the first came out right.

Nothing in the report explained how Roman came to be out there. A reader does not wait for the facts. In the comments under a story like this one somebody writes that a six-year-old should not have been anywhere near woods, and somebody answers that a grown person should have been watching him. Neither has met the family. The verdict does a job for the one who writes it. If the mother was careless, a careful mother can go on believing the woods are a long way from her own door. Jesus warned, “For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2).

The relief at the end brings a temptation. Somebody who prayed through the two days wants to say that God answered the family’s prayers. A Christian can thank God for a boy who is alive and mean it. The same words, prayed in some other county by people just as sincere as the searchers in Lawrence County, have been followed by a funeral. Anyone who has not settled ahead of time what a happy ending says about God can be glad for the Heilman family and still keep those other families in mind.

Three · Where the ground is

A voice heard in the wilderness

Hagar had been sent into the wilderness of Beersheba with her son Ishmael and a skin of water by Abraham, who had risen early in the morning to do it. When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under a bush. She sat down a bowshot away, because she could not stand to look on “the death of the child” (Genesis 21:16). The text says she lifted up her voice and wept. The next verse says that God heard the voice of the boy and that the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven. “Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is” (Genesis 21:17), the angel told her. Hagar could not bear to look at where the boy lay. The angel was saying that God knew where he was. Searchers in Lawrence County did not know where Roman was for two days, and neither did his family. Genesis 21 tells a parent that he was within the hearing of God through all of those two days.

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7) was David’s question about himself. He sent himself up to heaven and down to Sheol to look for a place out of reach. At the far edge of the sea he found that “even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me” (Psalm 139:10). The comfort in the psalm belongs to a man who has been found. The psalm gives the reader a place where God is. Nothing in it promises how a search for a child will end, and David wrote no such promise for any father or mother.

Matthew set down the sound the mothers of Bethlehem made after Herod’s soldiers came, “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18). The verse names weeping twice, and Matthew gives the mothers no sentence of explanation. Scripture records the boy heard in the wilderness. The same Scripture records the mothers of Bethlehem who lost theirs to the soldiers of a king. Anyone who supplies an explanation for some other mother’s grief has gone further than Matthew went.

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?” (Luke 15:4) was a question Jesus put to tax collectors and sinners and to the Pharisees who muttered about them. The man in the story called his friends and neighbors together when he found the sheep. He said, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost” (Luke 15:6). The people who sang in the Kentucky woods and then heard the boy was safe had a small share of that joy. Jesus told the story about sinners, and the reader who has been counting children is one of the sheep in it.

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10) was Jesus’ answer to the crowd that grumbled when he went to eat at the house of Zacchaeus. The seeking he spoke of ended on a cross, where Christ died in the place of sinners. On the third day God raised him from the dead. He is coming back, and the church holds that hope together in a room, where a family whose child has died can be sat beside by people who know the child’s name.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Two of these fit before bedtime tonight, and the other three take a few phone calls and a quiet half hour.

1. 01

   Put a current photograph and a written description where a neighbor could find them.

   Take a photograph of each of your children today in the clothes they have on. Write beneath it the child’s height and coloring and any detail a stranger would need that you could not recall in a panic, such as a medical condition or a nickname the child answers to. Keep one copy in your phone and one on paper in a kitchen drawer. Give a third to the neighbor who would be first at your door. The CBS report named the color of Roman’s jacket and the kind of shoes he wore, the sort of detail a parent has to produce on the spot.

2. 02

   Find out how your county calls for search volunteers.

   Phone the sheriff’s office or the county emergency management office during business hours and ask how volunteers are called out when a child is missing. Ask what training they require and if the office keeps a list. Put your name on it if there is one, and write the office’s number next to the photograph from the first job. Hughes said that in Lawrence County so many people came that some were asked to wait while the crews already on the ground were organized.

3. 03

   Close the case you opened against the family.

   Find what you wrote or said about how a six-year-old came to be in the woods, in a comment or a text, and delete it. Then tell God, with Matthew 7:1-2 open in front of you, what you decided about the parents without a fact to go on. Ask forgiveness for the part of that verdict that was meant to keep your own children safe. If you posted it where other people read it, delete the post and tell anyone who answered it that you did.

4. 04

   Stand in each child’s doorway before you go to bed.

   Walk through the house tonight and stop at each child’s doorway long enough to ask God to keep the sleeping child there. Read Psalm 121:4 in the last doorway, “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Then go to bed, since the psalm names the one who stays awake.

5. 05

   Ask your church what happens if a child goes missing during a service.

   Ask your pastor or the children’s ministry director who counts the children in and out, who watches the doors and who calls 911 first. Ask when the parents are told and who stays with them. If there is no written plan, offer to draft one with the director and carry it to the elders. A church that keeps other people’s children has taken up the work of the man who left the ninety-nine to go after the one.