Found!

There is something that my church and Irving School have in common. Each place has space dedicated to a lost and found. It's amazing to me how these two repositories seem to attract similar items. Clearly, one's ability to lose things crosses lines of culture, class, age, and yes, faith.

I'm pretty sure that over the course of the last decade, I've forfeited more than an entire day of my life to tracking down lost gloves, hats, coats, Bibles and textbooks between these two locations. As I'm rummaging thru one stack or the other, two thoughts frequently cross my mind. One is wondering what happens to all those single mittens and gloves? While I know items like coats and hats are donated after remaining unclaimed for months, can you actually donate single gloves, or do they somehow find their way to the Island of Misfit Toys?

The other frequent (yet unrelated) thought that crosses my mind is that perhaps I should duct tape every single item directly to my children to ensure they arrive home with whatever it is they took with them when they left the house.

Here's something else the two places have in common: in spite of dedicating significant cabinet/locker space to lost and found items, my family's missing stuff never winds up there. I swear that there's an invisible black hole that follows my family everywhere, and when one of us drops something the black hole quickly swallows it up. On super-rare occasions, the black hole regurgitates. For example, once I was going thru Irving's lost and found looking for a coat Drew had lost...and ended up finding one of Erin's favorite sweaters that had been gone for months and had somehow eluded my previous searches for it.

And, as many of you know, I teach Sparks (religious education) on Wednesday evenings at our church. A few years back I put my Bible on top of the coat rack while I got my coat on and helped the kids with theirs. I realized when we got home that I'd left my Bible back at the church. I thought if I went back first thing in the morning it would surely be there, but alas, it had been swallowed by the black hole. I checked everywhere - the coat rack where I left it, the lost and found, and every place in between - to no avail. I was heartsick...it was my favorite Bible, the one my parents had given me years and years before. I kept looking and kept checking...and six months later I still hadn't found it. I'd pretty much given up hope of ever seeing that Bible again. And then one day, more than a year later, I thought I'd just go and check one last time in the lost and found. Lo and behold! The black hole had regurgitated! There among 35 other Bibles that had been lost by one person but found by another was my beloved, long-lost Bible! How does that happen?

So when Drew came home from school on the last day before Christmas break with only one glove, I assumed the other was in the black hole. And had this particular glove been just a cheap $.50 knit glove, I probably would have never bothered to even search Irving's lost and found for such an item. But he lost his good heavy snow glove, and I really didn't want to replace it without at least a cursory search thru the lost and found. So this morning I went into the building and checked the lockers marked Lost and Found: gloves and hats and guess what?! Right there on the top of the heap of the very first locker I opened was Drew's missing glove! I couldn't believe it! It's the equivalent of a post-Christmas miracle! I mean, this never, ever happens to me. It's the first time since my kids have started losing things that I've retrieved something on the first attempt. Thank God for small favors. And it sure seemed like the Hallelujah Chorus was playing somewhere nearby.