Words from WW Blog

WORDS FROM W.W.                                                   February 2, 2019

Luke 15:8-10  “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.” In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

I pulled into our garage, weary from a day of substitute teaching 8th Grade math (WHAT!!!) and then going to our basketball games at another school’s gym. I stepped out of the CRV and then opened the back door.

That’s when it hit me! I had left my backpack at the school where we had played. It was too late to drive the 25 minutes back since it was already 9:20 when I arrived home. I’d have to wait until the next day and hope that someone from the custodial team or the school security team had picked it up and put it in a secure place.

The backpack contained a couple of granola bars, dry erase markers, gum, pens, pencils, cough drops, a bottled of water, and a snack bag of trail mix. BUT, unfortunately, it also had my Mac Airbook laptop!

I went inside the house and called our varsity coach to let him know, and to ask him to send out an email to our team. I knew exactly where I had left the backpack and maybe someone a little more responsible than me had picked it up from behind our bench.

And I told Carol! Thus began the worrying! She worried! I was simply irritated at my irresponsibility! I had already forgotten the shirt I had worn to school that day. After school I had gone into a staff restroom to change into my TCA Titans coaching shirt, but had left the long sleeve Land’s End dress shirt hanging on the hook behind the door. Carol had already retrieved that forgotten item for me…and now this.

We called a couple of credit cards to put temporary freezes on any activity since we were worried about possible info somehow getting accessed. 

And then I went to bed! Carol stayed up and worried! I fell asleep and she stayed awake…even after she went to bed! I did have a dream about the backpack, going to the school where I left it and walking around with their Athletic Director to all the possible places it could have been put. We looked in a laundry bag, a hidden closet, the school office, the teacher’s lounge, and in the bleachers. No backpack! Carol, however, worried about the potential loss, thought through the Thursday morning search details and prayed for its recovery.

The next morning I called my athletic director and asked him to call the AD of the high school where we had been about the missing item. A little while later I called the school and was told that the bag was in the office.

Carol and I went and picked it up and celebrated with breakfast at Chick-fil-A!

What occurred to me as I reflected on the mishap is the difference in urgency that each one of us had. Even though it was my laptop that was missing I wasn’t as concerned about it as much as my wife. Nothing else mattered to her except finding the lost backpack.

When I read the parable about the lost coin I sense the urgency in the woman who had lost it. Nothing else mattered! The lost coin must be found. Everything else in  life was put on hold until she could find it.

So many of us, however, have an attitude that resembled mine. Concern, but not that much! I was even thinking about when I might go to the Apple store to buy a new laptop. In essence, I was thinking about the lost laptop remaining lost and just getting a new one.

Most of us have an attitude like that when it comes to someone who is spiritually lost. We want him to be found, but we’re prone to just move on ahead without much of a search effort. In the parable of the lost coin the widow’s anxiety was not eased until she found what needed to be searched for. 

The good news for me is that Carol spent soundly the next night!