The phone rang in the mission office at 8:30 in the morning, the kind of hour when the day is just beginning to take shape and coffee hasn’t fully done its work yet.

The woman on the other end did not give her name.

She told the office staff that she knew me and that I had been to her house before. The phone number on the caller ID wasn’t local—one of those small details that doesn’t mean much at first, but later refuses to be ignored.

She said her boyfriend was beating her.

She said she was pregnant.

She asked us to come get her.

And then the line went dead.

The office called the number back immediately. This time she answered, her voice frantic and unsteady. The staff member told her to call 911. She refused. She said they wouldn’t help her. She said she needed help now.

Then the phone went dead again.

When the office called me, the story came in fragments. No name. No address. No clear location. Just fear, urgency, and a dead phone. We tried calling the number ourselves. Nothing. Straight to silence.

We started calling people we knew. No one recognized the number. No one could place the situation.

With almost nothing to go on, we called 911 ourselves.

The only possible lead we had was a woman in Farmington staying in a motel. A few nights earlier, she had called the mission asking for money for Tylenol because her boyfriend had beaten her badly. She had used a word that stuck with us—“ragdoll.” We weren’t sure it was the same woman, but it was the only thread we had.

Police went to the motel. They confirmed her boyfriend was already in jail—and that it wasn’t her.

Back to nothing.

Meanwhile, both we and local police continued trying to track down the original phone number. Eventually, they pinged the signal. When the location came back, everything made sense at once.

It was the family we had taken water to in the backcountry.

The same rutted roads.

The same isolation.

The same place where help is measured in hours, not minutes.

We contacted Navajo PD and gave them everything we had—names, phone numbers, and an approximate location. They told us they would take it from there. Then came the part that always lands heavy: they had one officer patrolling our entire area.

It would be a while.

At that point, I made a decision.

I trusted them to handle it.

On paper, it was the right call. This was a domestic violence situation, and we are not law enforcement. Still, as the morning stretched into afternoon, the weight of that decision stayed with me. I kept thinking, Should I have gone the moment we figured out who it was? I knew the road. I knew how far out they were. I also knew the danger of walking into something I wasn’t equipped to control.

Faith doesn’t remove tension. Sometimes it sharpens it.

At around 1:30 in the afternoon, Navajo PD pulled into the mission.

The officer hadn’t gone out yet.

He needed directions.

She had called for help at 8:30 that morning.

I pulled up the map, dropped a pin near their location, and talked him through the road—the washouts, the turns that don’t look like turns, the places where GPS lies. Then he drove off.

Later, we learned that she was okay.

And we also learned something harder to sit with: she stayed with him. They are still together.

That part of the story doesn’t resolve anything. It simply tells the truth. Out here, cycles don’t break cleanly. Fear, isolation, dependency, and history all tangle together in ways that don’t fit neat endings.

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The space between urgency and wisdom

This is the space ministry often occupies out here—the narrow gap between wanting to act immediately and knowing when not to.

Scripture names that tension clearly:

“The prudent see danger and take refuge,

but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.”

— Proverbs 22:3

That verse isn’t about fear. It’s about discernment.

Some days, faith means getting in the truck and going.

Other days, faith means trusting others to act—even when waiting feels unbearable.

This story doesn’t end with a victory or a bow tied neatly at the end. It lingers, the way many do here.

Because on the reservation, help is often delayed.

Because resources are thin.

Because the road is long.

And because being present—truly present—means walking alongside people even when they return to places we wish they wouldn’t.

That’s the work.

That’s the calling.

That’s life on the Mission.