The Voice in the Ravine

In March of 2019, search and rescue volunteer Dale Hitchens spent fourteen hours combing the hills outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee, looking for a seventy-three-year-old woman named Ruth who had wandered off a marked trail. His team leader radioed twice to call it off. Visibility was dropping. Temperature was falling. Ninety-seven other hikers had made it safely back to the trailhead that day.

But Dale kept walking. He told his wife later he couldn't explain it — just a feeling that Ruth was close, that she needed someone to keep looking. He found her at dusk, huddled against a fallen oak at the bottom of a shallow ravine, hypothermic and disoriented, clutching a granola bar wrapper like a lifeline.

When the paramedics loaded Ruth into the ambulance, Dale sat on the tailgate of his truck and wept. Not from exhaustion, though he had every reason. He wept from relief. From joy. "I just kept thinking," he said, "what if nobody came?"

Jesus told the Pharisees that a shepherd leaves ninety-nine safe sheep to search for the one that wandered off. And when he finds it, he doesn't scold. He lifts it onto his shoulders and calls his neighbors to celebrate. The Almighty does not do cost-benefit analysis with His children. He counts, and when one is missing, He goes — not grudgingly, not efficiently, but relentlessly, joyfully, until He brings that one home.