Lost and Found

What follows is something I talked about during the children’s sermon last Sunday.  Some people said they got at least as much out of this as they did the regular sermon, so I thought I would share it with you, too.

Have you ever lost something important?  I remember a time back when I was a lawyer.  There was something I was working on, and there was a paper that I really needed to have.  I looked in the file and—I couldn’t find it.  I looked farther.  I still couldn’t find it.

I started to get worried.  I looked through the entire file, front to back.  I still could not find the paper I needed.  I looked through the file back to front.  I still could not find it.

By now, I was starting to panic.  I really needed to find that paper.  I looked through some other files that had been close to that file, thinking I might have put the paper in one of them by accident.  Still nothing.  I went through the entire file one more time.  I still could not find that paper.  It was like it had vanished.

I was getting frantic.  I decided to pray about it.  I’d like to say I prayed because I’m such a spiritual person, but in fact I prayed because I simply did not know what else to do.  I was going to be in big trouble if I could not find that paper.  So, I closed my eyes and prayed that God would somehow help me find that paper.  I opened my eyes, and there it was.  It was sitting right on top of the pile of papers on my desk.

Maybe you don’t believe that story.  I could not believe it myself, when it happened, but I swear that it’s true.  When I opened my eyes after praying, that paper was right on top of the stack of papers I had.  It was right in front of me.

I still don’t know how it got there.  Did God somehow magically make that paper appear on my desk?  I suppose that’s possible.  God can do anything—that’s part of the definition of being God—so God certainly could have done it that way.

What I suspect, thought, is that the paper was there the whole time.  I just had gotten so panicky and so frantic that I could not see it.  When I prayed, God calmed me down and helped me see things clearly.  And once God did that, I was able to open my eyes and see the solution to my problem, a solution that had been right in front of me the whole time if I’d just been calm enough to see it.

So if you have a problem and you don’t know what to do, I’d suggest that you pray about it.  Close your eyes, pray, then open your eyes and see what happens.  It could be that God will magically solve your problem.  But if not, there’s a good chance that God will help you calm down and see things more clearly.  And when we do that, a lot of times we’ll see that the solution has been right in front of us the whole time, if we’d just been calm enough to see it.