Lost, FOUND … and a prayer request
/As we await a new missions report from the field (Pastor Peter Haneef is working on one), I thought I would regale you with a report-of-sorts from my own small, super-local Canadian field.
First though, please be in prayer for our dear Pastor Paul, director of Bibles for Mideast. He was just admitted to hospital with difficulty breathing. He also of course has his own miraculous and dramatic ‘lost and found’ backstory, which you can read here.
Let’s all join our breath in praying and proclaiming ‘BE HEALED IN JESUS’ NAME!’ over Pastor Paul.
LOST AND FOUND
I have been writing up and collecting stories for years into a folder I call ‘Lost and Found’. The nomenclature is particularly apt for two main reasons.
Firstly, the stunning words forming the first verse of John Newton’s hymn Amazing Grace tell for the ages Newton’s own experience of being marvellously rescued from a life as a mean-spirited slave-ship owner. The words later became attached to what surely must be the most beautifully haunting melody ever composed (though not by Newton). And of course, Newton was not only rescued, he was SAVED into caps-lock LIFE with Christ. He was FOUND. Aren't we all beyond thankful to have been Found?
Title and First Verse of 'Amazing Grace' in the first edition of the 'Olney' Hymns hymnal [Cowper & Newton Museum]
Secondly, all my ‘lost and found’ stories show I think, in Godly-odd ways, how the not-even-so-valuable can be miraculously restored … a.k.a. FOUND. Like us.
The stash of tips
I’ll start with my oldest account, which took place many years ago. As a fairly new Christian who’d been catapulted from the false light of so-called ‘New Age’ into the Truest-Light Kingdom, I was still learning and growing in my new faith—not knowing yet of course that would prove a life-long quest.
A journalism student at the time, I thoroughly enjoyed a part-time job as a coat-check in a ritzy Italian restaurant in the Yorkville area of Toronto. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, I‘d hang up the expensive coats and jackets in my cosy little back corner of the restaurant, change the classical music CDs, banter with the well-dressed waiters, and listen in, unnoticed behind a few potted plants, on the conversations all around me. Politicians, actors, lawyers, business tycoons … I learned quickly they’re not much different from the rest of us.
My only pay was tips from the posh patrons, and Thursday and Friday evenings in particular meant huge stashes of two, five and occasionally larger denomination dollar bills. Mordecai Richler (a famous Canadian writer who died in 2001), for example, would leave me $20 bills just for stashing his beat-up briefcase!
After one particularly profitable evening at the restaurant, a friend and I had made plans to go see a late movie afterwards. I carried a large bag, and I placed my super-stuffed wallet inside of it. I do recall placing the bag under the aisle seat in front of me at the theatre, and also that I had the unfortunate tendency to leave the bag (okay, and the wallet too) wide open. Not until the next day did I realize the wallet no longer sat in my big awkward bag.
Of course I had no idea how it might have been lost. It may have fallen out enroute to the theatre, it may have tumbled out or been stolen there, or it could easily have fallen out on the trip back. The friend agreed to join me in retracing our steps the next day, and we kept our eyes peeled for any stray wallets along the meandering paths, alleys and streets we’d taken to and from the theatre.
We reached the movie theatre without finding my wallet. When I inquired inside, they said no one had turned it in. I explained where we’d been sitting, so someone went to look for it and to our huge surprise came back with the overstuffed, still wide-open wallet! When I counted the bills, not a single dollar had been lost.
How could cleaners not have found an open, overfull wallet lying on the floor at the end of an aisle and only slightly under a theatre seat? Mystified, I thought maybe if I asked God I just might possibly get some kind of explanation. It couldn’t hurt to try.
I’d never really ever heard God clearly, but did know He had so often guided and protected me. So I decided to give the new ‘prayer language’ I’d been awkwardly trying to cultivate a go. It always sounded silly to me, like a child making up sounds.
How I’d begun to use it was nothing like the stories most tongues-speaking Christians tell—how it ‘arrived’ with their baptism in the Holy Spirit. I still wasn’t sure what that was either. But the sparkly fellow who had led me in prayer to become Christian in the first place—who had basically bent my arm into saying “OK! Jesus was God on earth!” and when I did, an explosion went off in my brain and I KNEW it was true—well, he’d given me one of his ‘special words’ and told me to use that as practice. So that’s what I’d been doing. I’d say his word a few times, then experiment by adding other sounds that just fell into my mind. Like I said, it seemed rather foolish. But the mystifying accompanying peace also let me know I was on the right track.
So I decided to try 'the words’. A few of the same old familiar sounds tumbled out, but then I most definitely heard something, deep inside, that was so odd yet at the same time seemed a perfectly spiritually acceptable way to clarify what was otherwise so mysterious.
The explanation I ‘heard’ with what I can only explain as spiritual hearing is that the wallet had been hidden from human sight in a ‘kesia [pronounced kee-see-ya] envelope’. Somehow, spiritually, that made some sense. It seemed quite logical that in a realm we cannot see, a ‘kesia envelope’ described a folding of the atmosphere, a wrinkle in the space-time continuum perhaps, that temporarily cloaked the wallet and made it invisible to human eyesight.
Please let me know if you’d like to read any more ‘Lost and Found’ entries.
