I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking after a very vivid dream about my daughter. In the nightmare, she had appeared dead in the trunk of her car. I woke my husband and described the dream, and then asked him to pray with me. We prayed together for several minutes and, when he drifted back to sleep, I continued praying for more than an hour until I had a sense of peace and could doze off.
The clarity of the dream was unusual for me, but waking up for a heart-pounding prayer session was not. I call it my “mommy radar,” but when my children are in serious trouble, I almost always know it. I woke once in that state of high alert and, like this time, awakened my husband to pray. Right after I finally fell back to sleep, the police called. We had 10 minutes to get our minor daughter or she was going to jail. She had snuck out of her friend’s house and was with people we did not know, drinking. That was early in the journey of addiction in our family.
With this vivid dream, I could not shake my sense of worry, even the next morning. My husband trusted my motherly intuition, especially after a few years of seeing it at work.
He decided to drive to the part of town we knew my daughter had last been. This suburban area was right behind a gleaming, beautiful, new community center. As he drove along those streets, about one block from that new building, drug dealers and prostitutes came to the window of his car, peddling “whatever you want.” When he said he was looking for his daughter, they sent him to a nearby street, again and again. It was a spiderweb-like network of dealers and pimps. Each time he drove down a new street, they already knew he was coming.
Eventually, he found her car. The doors were unlocked and the car had been ransacked, but he could not get into the trunk. My husband called the police, who helped him track down the keys, which were now in someone else’s possession. He had “borrowed” the car from my daughter.
With the police present, my husband unlocked the trunk to find some piles of clothes—but not our daughter.
I eventually heard from my daughter after days filled with indescribable worry. Many months later, she told me she had temporarily traded the car for drugs that day. Right before that, she spent a couple nights sleeping in the trunk.
Trust your gut, moms, dads and loved ones, and pray without ceasing for your family members and friends who are struggling with addiction. God answers prayer.
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