I’m an absent-minded professor sometimes.  I always lose stuff.  It drives me crazy!  I feel like by the time my kids are 5 I’ll have looked for juice cups for at least 24 hours – maybe even 48!  I lose keys frequently.  I misplace my coffee.  I lose my marbles (but thankfully not my lunch!)

This past weekend was a microscope into this issue.  A few weeks ago I lost a DVD for the John Adams series that I’m really into right now & I couldn’t finish the story.  Friday night I found it by my bed in a big pile of stuff.  Sunday, however, was filled with scares.

After second service at church I went to get my girls like I typically do (of course there are exceptions to this, but recently I’ve been doing it).  I left Kenzie with a 5th or 6th grader to go get a cookie.  I then went with Kate to watch her go down the slide on the playground and by the time I turned around, Kenzie was gone!  My heart raced.  The girls know where to walk to the office and know to stop at the crosswalk, but the temptation is often great to want to cross, so immediately my mind raced to a horror image.  Instead of freaking out, I simply walked briskly with Kate in search of her sister.  A few people looked alarmed and I asked if they saw “the other one,” but to no avail.  When I finally saw the girl who was watching Kenz she said she went with Grandma, but I still wanted to search for her.  After getting to the office with emotions on edge, she was fine – but I was experiencing a “lost” feeling like never before.

A few hours later I cherished the time raking a pile and then jumping in the leaves with the kids.  I took a nap and when I awoke I had lost my phone.  I knew it’d turn up, but at the same time, I use it frequently during the week, so I wanted to make sure I had it to start the week.  After searching the house, the cushions, my office, every place at the church and my car, I gave up.  I realized I needed to just let go.

Would you know the next morning in my quiet time I read 1 Corinthians and was absolutely convicted and encouraged?  Here’s one of the paragraphs I read:

29What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; 30those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; 31those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away. (NIV, italics mine)

I shared this with Sherry a few minutes after reading it, and expressed my getting God’s point to her.  We laughed and I was off.

On the way to work I decided to look in the leaf pile where we jumped, not thinking at all it could have fallen out there and what might have happened overnight or during our adventure if it was there!  It was.  And all was fine.  It was crazy.  I remember praying in the backyard, “Lord, please help it be here.”  And it was.

I definitely do use that phone (a thing of the world), but I realized that I clearly am engrossed in it.  It concerns me.  Technology is quite the hook.  Am I addicted?  Do I use it for good enough to justify my use of it?  Or am I lost like the things I lose?

The realization of losing my daughter for the 10 minutes I did was the worst feeling ever.  And yet it was the greatest picture of how Our Heavenly Father longs to bring us to Himself and how lost we are when we don’t draw to him.  We can be prodigals (Luke 15), coins being searched for (Luke 15.8-10), sheep (Mt. 18:12-14) or many other things Jesus talked about.  God does not want that, but at the same time lets us if we so choose.  We are more important than stuff.  God longs for this.  It pains Him, I believe.  Yet while I was ridiculously scared, God is not.  He is Sovereign.

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