Lord, to whom shall we turn? We can’t do it alone

     There are a lot of moments in life where we get caught up doing something and suddenly look at the clock and realize we should have left about ten minutes ago if we were going to be on time for a certain appointment. One morning, this exact incident happened to me—I had gotten involved in a book I was reading for class and the next thing I knew, it was time for a meeting with a professor.

     I frantically grabbed my books, keys and shoes to head out of my apartment, and made my way to the elevator. Stepping out of the elevator, though, was an elderly couple accompanied by a police officer and nurse. I immediately stepped aside and was attempting to get in the elevator when the nurse asked me if I knew where a certain apartment number was. The number, however, was unfamiliar to me and I told the nurse that I didn’t think the apartments on my floor went over 1109. She shook her head sadly and turned to the elderly couple, still stationed in the elevator to tell them the news.

     The wife, however, was insistent that they were in the right place and attempted to move out of the elevator and look around. Looking around, though, she didn’t recognize anything about the hallway and returned to her husband, sobbing. “I was so sure,” she kept mumbling to him. He merely let her cry on his chest as everyone returned in the elevator to the first floor.

     As we made our way down, the nurse told me that the wife had Alzheimer’s and she had escaped from the nursing home. She had been found outside the apartment by the police officer, who had called the nursing home. She had told the police officer that she had lived in this apartment building with her husband on the eleventh floor. When the nurse arrived with the woman’s husband, they had thought it best to let her see what she had walked so far to know.  Leaving the elevator, I turned back one last time to glance at the couple, knowing how difficult it must be for the husband to see his wife in such a condition. Yet, he must have been thankful that she knew him—that was his blessing in the midst of such an atrocious disease.

I made my way to my car thinking about what I had just witnessed. When we’re young, we fail to think about those years later in life when we may have to be completely reliant on others, when we may be unable to do things for ourselves, when we may be unable to remember who or where we are. As I drove to my meeting, I remembered how frantic I had been about being late, chastising myself for failing to keep an eye on the time. And I realized how insignificant a lot of the things that we get caught up in truly are.

     I know that I won’t be considered elderly for quite a few years, but we never know when we may have to rely completely on others. Anything could happen—any accident, any disease, any catastrophe. There are so many times in our lives that we need the help of others in some way. It may not even be an incident where we need to be completely dependent upon them, but we do need others in a number of situations—physically, emotionally, spiritually.

     God brings certain people into our lives for a reason, reasons which we may never know until much later. If we think back to the times when we have desperately needed someone to be there for us, we know that there has always been at least one person that we went to or wished we could have gone to. Why is that? I know, particularly now as I continue working on my master’s thesis, that I could not have made it this far in the semester by myself. There are many times when I’ve gotten dejected and questioned myself, wondering why I even bother continuing on. And then I talk to one of my close friends undergoing the same process or I talk to my fiancée, and they continually encourage me and remind me of the reasons why I love doing what I’m doing. God brought each of those people into my life and I like to think that he’s done so because he knows that I question and he knows that I need reminders and encouragement.

     Who do we need in our lives? Who are those people that show themselves to be our best friends, those we can rely on for anything? There will always come a time when we need another person—who do we have to rely on?

     Heather Bozant can be reached at hbozant@clarionherald.org.