Ask Yourself To Care

The beautiful Elizabeth Smart.

I don't know why I thought about this today but I did. Life is so busy and honestly we forget to be grateful for the life that we have. A few months ago I read 'My Story' by Elizabeth Smart and it was a beautiful book about survival and faith. Whenever I read memoirs it is usually about girls who have been kidnapped. My parents don't understand it because honestly it's heart breaking to read. Honestly I think that it's something that we need to read. Honestly if I was kidnapped I think a part of me would want to tell my story to let my kidnapper know that I don't have to keep their secret anymore. Elizabeth's book for some reason touched me. She was a girl who had a good Mormon family and even though I am not a Mormon I am a Christian and they are very closely related or at least that is what I found studying and researching the religion. I felt my faith be strengthened, no matter what happened Elizabeth trusted in God. One night she prayed to God, asking him why this was happening and he told her that she needed to hold on to do whatever she had to do to survive and would get her out of there. Bryan David Mitchell, her captor an insane demented man who doesn't know God at all. He would make her starve and thirst. She would sit at the camp and do nothing but be tied to a tree. One night she was sleeping in a tent with Mitchell and his also insane wife Wanda and woke up to find a cup of ice cold water out of nowhere. There was absolutely no water on the camp, they were in the dry mountains and if Wanda and Mitchell were thirsty and hungry there was no way that they were going to give Elizabeth water.

"I remember picking it up and drinking it and I could just feel the cold water running throughout my body. Just thinking how grateful I was for it and just feeling like it was God telling me that I wasn't forgotten. This was real, this really happened." - Elizabeth Smart

It makes you think about how many people are actually kidnapped. The people that we see every single day. It was absolutely heartbreaking to read about people seeing her and not saying anything, not doing anything. Even a police officer who even asked if it was Elizabeth Smart and asked her to remove her veil that was constantly around her face. Brain somehow convinced the police officer that it was not her. When she stared at woman hoping that somehow she would notice something in her eyes that this was not right, she had been kidnapped. The woman yelled at her and Elizabeth's hope had once again been crushed.
To hold on for nine months going into full survival mode doing whatever she could to make it. I don't know how she wouldn't didn't go insane. To be raped, starved, taken advantage of is horrible.
Okay there is one more story that I have to tell because it's appalling. One day when Elizabeth and her other two captors were at one of Mitchell's hideouts in California, they lived there for quite a while. Elizabeth was once again bored and saw a magazine laying next to her, desperate for anything to do she picked it up. She realized that it was a porn magazine, she gasped and dropped the magazine. This was a little girl who believed that porn was a bad thing, it was against her faith. Mormons are insanely modest and don't like to show a lot of skin. Imagine what that was like for her. Mitchell used that to his advantage, a smile grew across his face and picked up the magazine. He forced Elizabeth to look at each of its pages and take it in. Elizabeth couldn't close her eyes, she couldn't avoid it. Mitchell claimed that he was doing what God was telling him to do but he was wrong and Elizabeth knew that.
Read this book, it is insanely good and you will be shocked. Stay strong and I hope because of you and many other people who have been kidnapped will care a little more. To pay attention to the signs.
DFTBA
-AB