Small as an Elephant: Abandonment & Solutions

As a kid your absolute worst fear is your parents abandoning you. Since the beginning of time babysitter’s biggest pet peeve is when the front door slams and the couples’ kid goes bananas and scream into a raging fit thinking that their parents have left them for all eternity… when really they left for an hour and a half to watch the latest action movie.

In the book Small As An Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson an 11-year-old boy named Jack gets abandoned at a camp site by his mom. He is left in an unfamiliar state with

No money

No food

No direction

(Pretty much a kid’s worst nightmare come true).

Jack spent the rest of the book searching for his mom. He hoped to find her and return to his unstable life back home. Jack loved his mom and was loyal to her despite her failures as a mother. Jack’s mom had some psychological problems, she was impulsive and had as Jack called them “spinning times”. In her spinning times she had the mind set of a child and had no sense of reality then she spent weeks sleeping it off in bed. Needless to say his mother was sick and by not taking her medication it was negatively affecting Jack.

Jack felt abandoned emotionally his whole life, but now his mom had physically abandoned him. Every expectation he ever had for his mom had never been met. This reminds me of every time my friends have broken a promise or my parents have let me down. We are humans and we will break promises left and right, but Jesus Christ is the only one who never will. This is why I don’t put my hope in people anymore and only in Christ alone.

“Even if my father and mother should desert me, you will take care of me”. 

–Hebrews 13:5

Jesus knows that we are going to let people down… it’s inevitable.

Knowing this truth should motivate us to forgive one another. So despite all of Jack’s struggles in his journey to find his mom

Like…

Sleeping in the woods

Breaking his pinky finger

Sleeping in an L.L. Bean store

Stealing a plastic elephant & a bike

Getting robbed more than once

Getting locked in a metal vault

Hiding away in a garbage can

& to top it off a wretched sunburn!

He eventually learned to forgive her because she was his mother and he loved her. 

“Understanding triggers the compassion that makes forgiveness possible”. 

–Brennan Manning

This kid went through so many struggles in order to find his mom (spoiler alert: He never physically finds her. She left the country). But here’s the thing, all of this hardship could have been prevented if Jack had asked an adult for help. Jack encountered MANY adults in his journey and at the end of the story the entire state of Maine ended up looking for him. But never once did he ask for help… WHY?

OH WHY? This question literally annoyed me so much! Every time something bad happened to Jack and he would break down and cry I would literally want to hit him upside the head and tell him the suffering could end! All he had to do was tell an adult, “Hey! I’m the lost kid on the six o’clock news”.

BAM! Problem solved!

But Jack knew what would happen after he was found. He would be taken away from his mom and go live in another town with his awful grandma. Jack did not want change. He wanted to continue to live with his mom because he loved her.

It’s funny, Jack would rather live on the streets and starve than go live with his grandma. 

(PLOT TWIST: The grandma’s actually nice!).

Jack caused himself so much pain-when there was really a simple solution. He could have ended all of his troubles just by turning himself in and accepting change. We do the same thing as Christians. When we are headstrong about a certain situation and want our lives to go OUR way… Jesus tells us otherwise. Usually we don’t accept His plan with open arms (We’re all talk and no action). We initially reject God’s plan and try to change what the Lord has already set in motion.

Another thing… people love to dwell in my problems. Jack for instance loved the fact that the entire state of Maine was searching for him, but he didn’t want to be found.

(Talk about playing hard to get!)

Jack was living in a nightmare and he did not want to be saved. THIS IS US! When we’re in a heap of trouble we absolutely love dwelling in it and talking about it endlessly! But we never try to find a solution. It’s almost like we love being the damsel in distress…and we need to stop acting like a bunch of little girls!

Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves; Do what it says. –JAMES 1:22