Jesus told the people another story: What will a woman do if she has ten silver coins and loses one of them? Won’t she light a lamp, sweep the floor, and look carefully until she finds it? Then she will call in her friends and neighbors and say, “Let’s celebrate! I’ve found the coin I lost.” – Luke 15:8-9 (CEV)
I have gone to quite a few movies recently. I bought a pass that lets me go to up to three per week in the theater. Perhaps another week I will share some thoughts about what I have seen, and about the experience of going regularly to the theater in the summer that people have stopped going out to see movies, but not this week. Rather, this week it is the Lost and Found at the theater that is on my mind. I bought some used vinyl records right before going to a movie last week. It was mid-afternoon on a day that reached 100, so I could not leave them in the car or they would warp. I brought the bag in with me with trepidation, knowing that I was likely to forget it, but I was determined to keep track of it.
As I walked out of the theater, I got to the door and realized I did not have the bag of records with me. I rushed back to the theater, looking all around for it. Two other people were still in the theater, and they started to help me look for it, to no avail. I tried retracing my steps with no luck. I asked the person who had started cleaning up, but no luck there either. He took me to the lost and found desk and searched through the bins, but nothing was there either. I went home disappointed (but only out a couple of dollars so not a huge loss). A few days later, I was back for another movie and checked in again just in case someone found the bag. Two employees searched the lost and found desk, the record book of things turned in, and everywhere they could think of; nothing to be found. Someone must have picked up the bag and walked off with it (was my luck so bad that there was someone else interested in that handful of 25 cent clearance used records? What are the chances? These were not exactly high demand items!). Eventually I gave up and started to walk out. Suddenly one of the employees came running after me. The manager had put the bag in her office, where it was cooler and they were unlikely to be broken by somebody trying to mash them into a tight bin. It was her extra care that had almost made me miss finding what I had lost.
It was clearly not a worthwhile use of time and emotion tracing down and protecting these clearance LPs. They are not valuable and may or may not be all that interesting to listen to – the point of buying clearance ones is looking for forgotten gems, which means going through plenty of uninteresting ones to find the occasional treasure. Yet, the manager treated them as special and worth caring for; as something that someone had lost and would be excited to have found. And I was excited to get them, and it was made even more special by the care shown in keeping them for me.
Doesn’t that bring to mind Jesus’ parables of being lost and found? The figures in his parables are completely unreasonable in the effort they put forth to find something, given the limited value of what they are trying to find. Yet, it is the care and passion of searching that brings forth the value of being found. So too with us: we can feel like we are not really worth the effort that God puts into finding us, and yet in being found God’s pure delight can reveal to us how valuable we are in God’s eyes.