Did You Lose Something?

Picture this: Throughout the evening, you enjoy your dinner, chat with your family, take care of a few chores, then you head to bed. It’s just another night.

In the morning, you wake as usual and go through your getting-ready-for-work routine. As you head out the door, you suddenly realize that you don’t have your keys. You mumble to yourself, “Where are my keys? I thought I left them on the counter when I got home from work yesterday.”

You look all over the counter. No keys. You sift through the bills you dropped on the counter as you walked into the house yesterday. No keys. You look on the floor. No keys. You become agitated. If you don’t find your keys soon, you’re going to be late for work.

Your spouse walks into the room and notices your agitation. "Do you lose something?" they ask. "Yes," you impatiently reply, "My keys. I can't find them anywhere. I know I left them here yesterday. Have you seen them?”

The answer is no. You call to the kids to ask if they moved your keys. They haven’t seen them but they join the search.

You are becoming more frantic as the minutes tick by.

Losing something so simple - something you use every day - can create anxiety. When those keys were in your possession, you paid little attention to them. You simply used them when you needed them, usually multiple times a day. No big deal. But misplace them and suddenly there is no question as to the importance of your keys. They are small, but so integral to the continuity of your daily life.

We don’t intentionally lose things. We might be careless, distracted, or disorganized, but we don’t deliberately lose something we need or something that we value.

Once I left my wallet on top of a phone booth as I placed a call. (Yeah, I'm old enough to remember what those contraptions are.) When I realized my wallet was missing, I returned to the phone booth to retrieve it, but someone had taken it. I was careless and had my mind on other things. It is a hassle to lose something so valuable. Sometimes we lose things that cannot be replaced.

More distressing than losing a set of keys or a wallet is the loss of things vastly more important.

I'm thinking of passion for God and His Word, the kind of hunger that holds us in its grip. We want nothing except Him. No sacrifice is too great, no request unreasonable. We are struck by the awesomeness of our Savior and view with wonder and adoration the bloody cross of Calvary. We see God's hand in every little blessing, and all we live for is to please Him.

Then along come problems, temptations, mistakes, failures. Life presents us with relationship crises that distract us from the greatness of our God and His ability to help us through everything we encounter. Family members get sick, we lose a job...one thing after another calls to us, inviting us to look away from Calvary and its endless promises. People need us, we want to give ourselves a break, we justify our carnality, success causes us to think we are self-sufficient. Sometimes life just rolls on day after day and its routine lulls us into a deceptive state of pseudo-contentment. Yet all the while we are losing something...and we are not even aware of the loss.

Samson is one of the most dramatic examples of this type of loss. He was called of God and mightily used to win many victories. Yet he had one thing that he never conquered, and that one thing was his undoing. Yet, in the end, Samson - like the wayward son who came to himself - realized his loss. Though he could never return to his glorious days, before he was blinded by his enemy and forced to labor like an animal, he found what he had lost. Slowly, the power returned.

When trouble comes our way, it is easy to become self-absorbed and lose ourselves in the problems. David returned from a great victory to discover that the enemy had stolen his family members and property, along with the family members and property of his loyal followers. While David had been rejoicing in their victory, people and things that were valuable to him were being stolen from him, and he was unaware of it. Yes, bad things happen to good people. That's just life, and there is not a single thing we can do about it. But, as I recently heard a preacher say, before David could recover what had been stolen from him, he had to recover himself.

Sometimes, when a person loses something, they don't realize they have lost it until they need it, like our example of car keys. In regard to spiritual matters, we all probably need to be reminded that we always need Jesus, whether the day is going good or bad.

I've heard of people who throw away something because they do not realize how valuable it is. By the time they realize their mistake, it is too late. As long as we have breath in our body, there is hope for us to recover what we have lost. It is never too late to be filled with a fresh appreciation of our inability to function properly - spiritually, emotionally, and relationally - without the strength and wisdom of our Lord.

We can receive encouragement from God's promise to the nation of Israel as recorded in Jeremiah 29:13-14. "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the LORD: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the LORD; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive."