Impossible Odds

we hold again in our hands, this miracle of a new beginning together.
    The dream was so real it left a kind of hangover, but it was a sweet one, like a subtle perfume that hangs in the air of an empty room.
    Erik met with Dan Hardy to discuss the idea of getting a doctor from Adado to go in and check out Jessica’s and Poul’s condition, maybe deliver some medication. Hardy agreed that the idea of a doctor was good, since a local doctor was far more likely to receive the kidnappers’ trust.
    After being warned about his “need-to-know” status, Erik could only hope there wasn’t bad news about Jess’s condition motivating them to intervene, while keeping him in the dark for their own strategic reasons. He knew she needed her thyroid medication, and there was no guarantee it hadn’t been taken from her. If she didn’t have it, then she’d been without it for long enough that adverse reactions would soon begin to trouble her.
    But it could easily be that Dan Hardy and his colleagues were concealing worse news, to keep him from organizing his own rescue.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    Jessica:
    My imagination had begun to occupy more of my awareness than physical reality. As happens with anything practiced for hours every day over a period of months, I had developed visualization skills that made living either in memory or in fantasy a convincing experience. I spent a lot of my childhood in solitary activities, so I had a vivid imagination. I enjoyed that part of life almost as much as having a few good friends and participating in social activities.
    Still, I’ve always been a social person who enjoyed the company of others. And I felt how deeply this kidnapping ordeal had amplified my natural desire for human closeness, far beyond anything I’d known before. On most nights, that meant a silent conversation with my mom. Her passing in July 2010 was quick; she fell ill on a Friday with a case of severe flu. Nothing went right for her, and she was gone by Monday. That fast.
    I happened to be home at the time on my annual leave, and I witnessed my grieving father standing in the kitchen of their home and shuddering under the weight of the news that his childhood sweetheart and lifelong companion was gone. In that moment,both of us were emotionally broken. I watched him stand gripping the back of a chair, head hanging.
    He prayed, “God, I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you . . . butI choose to trust you.” It’s the reason we all played “I Don’t Understand Your Ways” at her funeral, a statement of acceptance of the unacceptable, of a higher purpose than we can comprehend.
    When I lay on that sleeping mat and recalled that moment in his life, the darkest cave he had ever been in, I realized his choice was pivotal in his recovery. Not by making it easy, but by making it possible.
    Even as confused as I was on spiritual issues back then, I felt the sheer power of that statement as soon as he made it, because in his case I knew his faith in that moment wasn’t about religion; it was the acknowledgment of his subjective experience of the spiritual aspect of his life. It was a conscious decision to trust that spiritual sense, whether or not he could explain it.
    After that day, he remained alone in their family home for the first time and began quietly grieving. Eventually it had been time for me to leave him there and return to Erik and our work in Africa.
    I had seen for myself that he didn’t just say the words “I don’t understand you, but I choose to trust you.” He lived by them. He went on from that moment, hour to hour and day to day, conducting himself the way he knew my mom would want him to do. I had already drifted from a lot of my childhood religious thinking, questioning various things, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with this strength of spirit I saw revealed in that hour.
    So during my time in the desert, at nights under the desert stars, I discovered that I took some of that strength from remembering my dad’s steady conduct. I echoed his words and willed them to be true for me as well, “God, I don’t understand this, but I choose to trust you.” Any degree of peace I was able to attain out there began and ended with that conviction. I planted my feet on it and put down roots.
    •  •  •
    The scrub desert region seldom gets rain, but when it does it comes in a liquid avalanche. I spent an entire day shivering in the kidnap car of the one called Dahir,