Of course they took it hard.

They showed up in droves, working late into the night, walking for hours in the cold. They called her name. They handed out flyers. They imagined difficult things but they clung to a hope and a prayer. They envisioned finding her, holding her in their arms, and with eyes stained with tears but wrinkled by a smile carrying her back to her parents. Not for glory or fame but for an assurance of success.

She may have been a complete stranger to them but they knew other little girls and they knew other parents. It didn’t matter where she came from, where she lived, or what language she spoke. She was a young child and she was lost. So they stepped up and declared, “Sir, I will help you find your daughter.”

For one moment in time they achieved an ideal. They became “willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and…willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort.” (Mosiah 18:8,9) They made themselves a part of the story. It wasn’t about his or hers, yours or mine but one heart and one mind. So when the tale ended in tragedy it became a story of their own personal failure, their own personal loss--not only of a beautiful child with a bright future but of a glimmer of hope for humanity.

She may have been beyond the collective reach of their arms and the combined periphery of their vision but she will not escape the aggregate flood of their tears or the concentrated supplication of their prayers.

That is how humanity survives.