Why should you be worried when no one asks you for help?
“Ma! Are you absolutely sure my little girl is here in this forest?” howled the distressed father as he staggered through underbrush in search of his teenage daughter. Every few steps he took, he would call out her name and then take another sloppy swig of the fiery bottle of whisky.
If it wasn’t for the liquid courage that coursed through his veins, he would never have the guts to go searching for his daughter alone in this desolate wilderness.
“Ma! Of course I am drinking! Stop lecturing me about it. It’s not going to help us find my daughter any sooner!” yelled the man defiantly at his phone.
“And are you sure Aiyana was not prank calling you an hour ago? Teenagers do that nowadays! Who jokes about being attacked by a grizzly bear?”
But before he could continue on with the conversation, his heart suddenly sank in his chest. For he saw droplets of fresh blood on the ground. Immediately he shoved the cell phone into his back pocket and flung his half empty bottle of liquor to the side.
As he followed the trail of blood deeper into the heart of the forest, he felt all of his senses heightened. He continued to scream his daughter’s name at the top of his lungs. From a distance, he suddenly heard a faint voice call back to him.
When he finally reached her limp and bleeding body, no words could express the agony he felt in seeing his daughter holding on to the very last threads of her life. As he held her tight and washed her face with his tears, he kept asking her why she didn’t call him for help.
When he finally lay her back down on the ground, he heard her weak voice whisper back.
“I did. I called you when I was little. I called you when I got bullied at school. I called you when I needed help with my boy troubles. I called you when I got pregnant and didn’t know what to do. But all these years you were too drunk to pick up. Why would I call you now?”
The act of asking for help requires deep vulnerability and trust. When a person stops asking for help, we often assume their problems have already been solved. But how many of us stop to consider that the absence of asking may also be a sign of the absence of trust as well?
