Lost and Found

Lost and found

I recently lost something that had me turning the whole house upside-down in search for it. I'd lost a set of office and house keys. I was obsessed with finding it, partly because they were important to me, and also because I knew that they were somewhere in the house - within eyesight and probably right under my nose (I had used them to enter the house and subsequently discovered they were missing while I was still at home). This in combination with my slightly neurotic personality had me going crazy for the past few days. I was on my hands and knees going through just about every nook and cranny in the house - inside closets and drawers, underneath furniture and carpets, in between the sofa cushions, inside coat and pant pockets, and all the garbage cans. I must have frisked myself a dozen times and spent as much time crawling around on the floor of the house as Coco our dog. I even interrogated my friends who had visited me earlier that day and asked that they frisk themselves (sorry Anna and Aaron). I had Jeanie rummage through the house with me and would've solicited Benjamin's help too if he was a little older and able to crawl better. I was hell-bent out of shape in my determination to find what I had lost.

In contrast to my self-determination, Jeanie in faith looked to God and prayed a simple short prayer for help in finding my keys. The thought had never crossed my mind - of petitioning God for something as trivial as this. I was reminded by Jeanie's prayer last night that Jesus once said that unless we become like children in our hearts, we will never find God.

This morning when I woke up, I had a strange prompting/impression on my mind to go downstairs to the basement and take a look. It was strange because I couldn't get the thought out of my head despite my belief that it was a highly improbable place to find the keys (I hadn't spend much time down there the day I'd lost them); and also because I had already searched that area numerous times. So just as I was about to leave the house for work this morning, I went down to the basement to take another look. I didn't see anything, so I went to grab my boots to go. And then I heard it ... jingle. It was coming out of Jeanie's boot that I had knocked when grabbing mine. I reached inside the boot and pulled it out, and there it was - my keys! I held them in my hand in amazement and wonder. They had now taken on a new sense of preciousness to me.

After celebrating with Jeanie, it occurred to us that there might be another perspective on which to view this whole incident. Could God have answered Jeanie's simple prayer to show us something about his heart? Could this be something like how God feels when he finds one of his lost sheep? When one of us prodigal sons/daughters finds the way home to our father's embrace? The gut-wrenching feelings of angst at the separation and the subsequent exhilaration at having found it - eclipsing all the prior angst and anxiety, became newly real to me. As Frederick Beuchner put it: What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was set next to life would scarcely fill a cup.

 

Comments

[Rudy Amid]

My wife is just as obsessive about finding lost items in the house.  I help to search, but sometimes I get annoyed because I feel it's not worth spending the time looking for trivial things like a wiffle ball or my daughter's puzzle blocks.  We can always get new ones.  However, my wife's persistent, so I go on my hands and knees to find them.

We also find that asking God to help us find it, make the search much shorter.  We've done it several times already.  Nothing is trivial in His eyes.

[Anna]

ted - aaron and i forgive you for making us frisk ourselves and eachother a million times.  BTW - you made us frisk my 2 year-old nephew too! LOL!