On a Saturday in February 1981, a nine-year-old boy named Jimmy Beveridge was walking a nature trail with his brothers about half a mile from their family’s camp on Palomar Mountain, northeast of San Diego. His brothers thought he was racing them back to camp. He never got there. Searchers found him four days later, curled up next to a tree in a ravine about two miles from the campground. He had died from the cold.
After Jimmy died, Ab Taylor, a tracker for the U.S. Border Patrol, and Tom Jacobs, a photographer, started a program called Hug-a-Tree and Survive. Search-and-rescue teams still teach it to children today. The main lesson is simple enough for a second grader. If you get lost, pick a tree, hug it, and stay put. A child who keeps moving is much harder to find than one who stays in one place. The program also promises children that nobody will be angry when they’re found. That part sounds small, but lost kids sometimes hide from the very people calling their names, because they’re afraid they’re in trouble.
Grown men aren’t much better. Most of us would rather drive an extra forty miles than stop and ask for directions. And when we get lost with God, a lot of us do exactly what those kids do. We hide from the one calling our name, because we’re sure he’s angry.
Two pieces of advice that seem to disagree
When we lived in Savannah, I taught middle school at a small Catholic school for just over $20,000 a year. I did my taxes that first year at one of those little tax-preparation cubicles set up in front of the cash registers at Walmart. The young woman typed in the number from my W-2, looked up, and asked what my other income was. When I told her that was all of it, she laughed out loud. She was sure I was kidding.