Two weeks ago, I started writing a post about how I woke up one morning dreaming of snow, and missed home for the first time. It was trivial and trite, but I was going to use it as a launching point for some introspective piece of writing exploring what I’ve learned since coming here and what I’ve come to appreciate more about where I’ve been.

A few days later, I was gearing up to write about how a man who lives in our Mobile Home Park and has done a lot of work for us, absolutely snapped. Claiming a long career as a Navy S.E.A.L., I watched as a kind and gentle man who has been loyal to my father-in-law for years and kind to my family since we arrived turned on us, expressing his explosive anger over an imagined slight by demolishing much of what he owned with sledgehammers and axes while I worked just ten feet away. or screaming profanities and accusations at my wife in front of our children. For days, I lived with the fear that some latent mental imbalance in a man who was already known to be intimately acquainted with violence had finally broken loose, and we had to worry about a trained killer with a vendetta who had his own set of keys to our gate and familiarity with our guard dog. I slept uneasily every night, until days later he finally came back around, made an apology, and acted like nothing had changed. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid of what he might do, and the fact that I practice my second amendment rights was only slight consolation.

But it was this morning that I learned what fear is. Jamie was in the kitchen with Kiana, baking pumpkin bread, and the toddlers (Ivan and Sophie) were in the living room, watching Mickey Mouse. I went to lay Alex down before heading out to work on a broken water line, and when I came out, Ivan is missing.

At first, I expect to find him in the bathroom, playing with water, or somewhere else, getting into trouble with something he isn’t supposed to be playing with. But as I check room after room, closet after closet, he wasn’t showing up. The faucets were off, there were no unexpected messes, and he was nowhere to be found. I look under the bed. I look in the dryer (hey – who knows?). I look behind couches and chairs, under desks, on top bunks and in spare rooms. Nothing.

I start to get worried. Realizing something is wrong, Jamie joins in the search. We walk the yard, look out by the swings, check all the usual spots. All is quiet, but the front gate is open. Jamie goes out and looks down the street. No Ivan. Jamie calls her dad, working on the other side of the block in the trailer court. No Ivan there. It is at this moment that I am seized with bone-chilling dread. My son has been taken, I think. We live in a place with one of the highest incidences of kidnapping in the world, and my poor little two-year-old boy has been grabbed.

We start yelling his name, and searching more frantically. Jamie called the police, and there was a despair in her voice I’ve never heard. We’re always warning the kids to stay away from the street, that there are bad people here who take children. Without asking her, I know that we’re both thinking the same thing. I see two little boys playing behind the back gate, and in my panic think maybe one of them is my son. My hope fades when I get to the gate and find it securely locked, with almost no chance Ivan could have made it to the other side.  Unwilling to let got of possibility, however unlikely, I unlock the gate and rush through the other side. The children I saw belong to someone working on one of the trailers, and I ask him if he’s seen my boy. He says no, but he got in his truck and goes looking as well. We’re enlisting the help of neighbors, the police, anyone, and all the while I am begging God for help. Not my son I plead as I walk around the block, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Not my sweet, innocent little boy. Please protect him. Please don’t let anyone hurt him. In my mind, I can’t stop seeing him in the back of someone’s van, terrified, his little heart pounding in his chest. I want to protect him but I can’t, because I never saw him go. I feel powerless and desperate, and I call my parents and ask them to pray, hearing the horror in their voice as I tell them what’s happened.

Jamie is standing at the gate as I round the corner and I call to her, but she’s heard nothing. I walk into the front yard and, thinking of the struggles I’ve had in my faith over the past year, I nonetheless beseech God for assistance. I know that I haven’t been on the best terms with you lately, but I need your help. If you’re there, and you really love me, help me to find my son. I will do anything!

I go back inside, and begin retracing my earlier searches. Maybe he got knocked unconscious somewhere, I think, or has fallen asleep. I flip on the light in the dark room the kids sleep in and lay on the floor. I look under one bed, then the other, then for some reason, back under the first. There isn’t much under the bed, but against the wall, where I see some clothes that have fallen beneath, I catch the glimmer of light reflecting from two small eyes. As my own eyes adjust, I see his whole face, and it’s smiling, but silent. I reach out to him, tears in my eyes, unable to believe that he’s really in front of me, some forty minutes after I first discovered he was gone. “Please come to me Ivan. I’ll give you anything you want. Just come out.” He begins to cry, and finally scoots my way. As I lift him into my arms, I feel that his pants are wet, and I realize he was afraid that we would discover his mistake in the midst of his potty training. I ask him why he was hiding, and he says he is scared, but not of what. I realize also that I have been calling him loudly, yelling his name in desperation that could be construed by a small child as anger. I go outside, holding him tight, and place him in his mother’s arms, and I proceed to walk around the side of the house, where I fall into a chair and break down, the sobs coming as waves of relief and fear wash over me.

I have never been so terrified. I walk inside just as the police arrive and check in with us, to make sure Ivan is really back and we’re okay. We are okay but we’re also not, the adrenaline only now beginning to leave our systems.

Two nights ago, as we got the call that another water main had broken, I was annoyed. Yesterday, as I spent the day digging 75 feet of trench and helping to repair the damaged pipe, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to be alive. This morning, with the son I thought I had lost safely at home, I found the continuation of the hard labor of digging through the unforgiving Arizona dirt all but harmless. I didn’t let the choking wind-blown dust upset me or shirk away from being face-down in the mud, and I more comfortably settled into my routine of cobbled Spanglish conversation with my Mexican co-workers as we tried to solve the pipe puzzle. When the man who had gone postal just a week ago came by, acting normal, to see how things were going and talk to us about the upcoming operation on his hand, he seemed smaller and less significant than he had before.

This place is teaching me things – valuable things – and if they are things I didn’t expect, all the better. This is a day I will never forget. The kind of day that changes you. I hope that today, and tomorrow, and every day thereafter, I will be more conscious of the need to be a better father, a better husband, a better man. To complain less, to work more, to put my many worries and fears into perspective. Most importantly of all, the son I thought I’d lost has been found. I have so much to be thankful for.