What Was Lost Was Found

Yesterday, I realized I left my headphones at church.  As if Mondays weren’t bad enough on their own, I felt the brief moment of panic followed by the long moment of self-loathing that inevitably follows the discovery of loss.  You would think that my not having lost anything for a while would lessen the intensity of my lamentations, but they actually only served to increase them.  Maybe the juxtaposition of my own views of how responsible and mature I had become and the reality of my inability to not lose things served as some sort of accelerant to my disappointment in myself.  (Weird why I view those things as opposite–maturity and losing things.)

On my long, hungry walk toward work, I shot up a small prayer for the recovery of the lost.  I would like to say that I had full peace and confidence, but that would not be 100% true…let’s just say it definitely helped.

I sent out a few emails to the worship team and spent most of the morning IMing various members of the clean-up crew, trying to see if anybody had picked them up and put them in a safe place.  I repeated to myself that I knew exactly where I left them, as if somehow that knowledge could be passed backwards through time into the minds of those that were there.  Alas, nobody had grabbed them, and my mind’s desperate leap towards hope seemed to be coming up short.

I decided to take a long shot and call the college that our church meets in.  I thought maybe there was a chance somebody had turned them into a lost and found or maybe even that they were still there.  I got transferred through a bunch of receptionists and security guards until I finally got connected with the kindest librarian ever.  The library is on the same floor as the lecture room our church meets in and the librarian volunteered to take a look in the room for my headphones.  WHO DOES THAT?!

The joy of recovering something which was lost, even though it is something as easy to replace as a mass-market pair of headphones, was stunning.  The smile was uncontrollable.  Not to belabor the point, but the whole leave the flock of 99 to recover the 1 lost sheep seems to make a little more sense.

 

Just sub out shoulders for ears and sheep with earphones.  You get the idea I’m sure!

“And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’”

- Luke 15:5-6

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