Learning to bear with the unbearable

MICHELE MARR

When Ed Smart awoke to the realization that his daughter Elizabeth

had been abducted at night while he slept June 5, 2002, it was as

though the world came to a standstill.

“It was your worst nightmare come true,” he told me when we spoke

by telephone recently. The horror of the situation threatened to

incapacitate him. He couldn’t conceive how he was going to get up

every morning and go on.

“The first week Elizabeth was missing Lois and I thought, ‘This is

going to end. She’s going to come back into our lives.’”

But as days and then weeks went by Ed and Lois Smart were faced

with finding ways to bear the unbearable with no end in sight.

“It was so awful to not know what Elizabeth was going through. Was

she being tortured? Was she going through utter hell? It was so

painfully difficult,” Ed Smart said, as the words caught in his

throat. “There was a time when you just wanted to know is she dead or

is she alive?”

As hard as it was, it was best for Lois to imagine Elizabeth set

free of her mortal life, free of torment, in a far better place. She

had five other children God had given her to raise and she was

determined to keep the devastation that had befallen the family from

crippling them.

“Lois had a vision that said she could not allow the kidnapping of

one [of her children] to essentially kidnap all of them,” Ed Smart

said. “She felt strongly that Elizabeth, whether she came back to us

or not, was truly in the Lord’s hands.”

He could not shake his solid conviction that Elizabeth was out in

the world somewhere -- not even when he was told, “You know Ed,

statistically she’s dead. The chances are so minute that you will

find her and you can’t allow this to destroy your family.”

He knew he needed to make more of an effort to go on with life but

he also knew he had to do everything in his power to find his missing

daughter.

At one point he was admitted to a hospital on the verge of a

nervous breakdown, but after one night Ed Smart knew his place was at

home. Lois met him at the door of the house and they went inside,

knelt and prayed.

“I’ve always trusted God but we can become so traumatized, so

caught up in the situations we’re in, we don’t think about relying on

God,” he said. “Lois and I always have our morning and evening

prayers and our prayers on our food but this was something so very

different. It was like our spirits were talking to each other. I

really felt the Lord was there. I cherish that period ... There were

many good things that came from those months.”

The prayers reminded him of a hymn, “Prayer is the soul’s pure

desire.” The prayers gave him peace and an understanding with Lois,

an understanding of what she was going through and how she was

dealing with it. For nine months, Ed and Lois Smart prayed for the

return of their daughter. Friends, family and thousands of strangers

who felt for them prayed too.

Ed Smart is certain it was those prayers that enabled Elizabeth to

survive and return home.

“There is no other word than miracle, and (it was an) answer to

prayer for what happened in our lives,” he told me. “I think through

the difficulties we have, whether we bring them on ourselves or they

are thrust upon us, prayer is a way of working through them.”

So it’s no wonder that when the Greater Huntington Beach

Interfaith Council began looking for a keynote speaker to talk about

the power of prayer at its sixth annual National Day of Prayer

breakfast Ed Smart was at the top of the list.

Bruce Miller -- a Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council

charter member, former president of the south stake of the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a local dentist -- pursued Ed

Smart, who is also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints in Utah.

“He’s pretty shielded, which is natural,” Miller said. But once

having spoken with his bishop and his bishop talking to him, his

bishop called me back and said [Ed Smart] would be very willing to do

something like this. He felt it was a worthy cause.”

Miller had one concern.

“For every Elizabeth Smart there are hundreds of others whose

prayers aren’t answered the way we hope they would be.” But when he

talked to Ed Smart, he was put at ease.

“He is very sensitive to that,” Miller said. “I think that is what

his subject is going to be predominantly about: We who truly have

faith in God realize that the eventual outcome of all things is good

[although] they sometimes take divergent routes before we get to the

point of understanding their blessings on our lives.”

The two-hour breakfast will also feature a mariachi band, a

children’s choir, singer Debi Wheeler-Ure and a harp performance by

two of the Smart family’s children. Bruce Miller and retiring

Huntington Beach Administrator Ray Silver will be honored with the

interfaith council’s 2004 Peacemaker Awards.

Ed Smart will be accompanied by his wife Lois and his six

children, including Elizabeth.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@ soulfoodfiles.com.