Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Then David fled from Naioth at Ramah and went to Jonathan and asked, “What have I done? What is my crime? How have I wronged your father, that he is trying to kill me?”
“Never!” Jonathan replied. “You are not going to die! Look, my father doesn’t do anything, great or small, without letting me know. Why would he hide this from me? It isn’t so!”
But David took an oath and said, “Your father knows very well that I have found favor in your eyes, and he has said to himself, ‘Jonathan must not know this or he will be grieved.’ Yet as surely as the Lord lives and as you live, there is only a step between me and death.”
Jonathan said to David, “Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do for you.”
So David said, “Look, tomorrow is the New Moon feast, and I am supposed to dine with the king; but let me go and hide in the field until the evening of the day after tomorrow.

• 1 Samuel 20:1-5

“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?  And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’  In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

• Luke 15:8-10

In the first Scripture, Jonathan and David use “hide” in two different senses.  Jonathan claims that David is hiding the truth from him, failing to tell him all the facts, but David says that Jonathan’s father, King Saul, has done the hiding.  Then for a different sense of hiding, David hides while Jonathan investigates.  In the end, all is found.

In the second Scripture, Jesus tells a parable about a woman who loses a coin, but in the end, the coin is found, with much rejoicing. I have often thought about the party that the woman throws to celebrate the coin that was found.  Did the party cost much more than one silver coin?

The point is with these Scriptures: Everything was FOUND!!!!

The sock in the photo above was first featured in a post on 1 February 2018, A Lost Sock. I put two socks into the wash and only got one sock out. When the other sock was found there was much rejoicing. But then, the same thing happened to the same pair of socks after wearing them, wearing them for a celebratory lap, if you will. I again wore the socks, a few months later and they both disappeared the next time. Many months later, I noticed that the water was not draining when the washing machine was in the spin cycle. I found one of those socks, from the same pair, squeezed into the drain hose, essentially being the cork in the hose. Its mate has never surfaced. After a year of hoping, I threw the found sock away. That pair of socks had too much negativity.

For you seasoned veterans of life out there, you will know this scenario well, or maybe not.  My wife and I have more stuff than we have places to put it.  So, when we clean up, we find something that has no specific place to be, but we wish to keep it.  We lament that this thing has no spot, just for this simple item. Our mind suddenly says, “I will place it right here, out of the way, but I will never forget where I placed it.  It will always be in an ‘easy-to-find’ spot!!!!”

Here is my question, and it is not a rhetorical question.  I really, really want to know the answer.

Where is the place where you place things, when you told yourself it was an “easy-to-find” spot that would never be forgotten?

I may have found one item in a hundred that I have placed there.  In finding that item, it was never when I was looking for it.  I was looking for the two hundredth item that I had placed there AFTER that item when I accidentally found the thing I had lost last year or was it the year before?  Then, where are the other 99 things out of that hundred?

What brings this on?  I had this wonderful Low-FODMAP cookbook.  My wife wanted me to cook something this week.  “Get what you need when we go grocery shopping next!”  My wife had complimented me on cleaning off the kitchen table the day before.  The memory of seeing the cookbook on the table was less than 24 hours old.  Not last week, yesterday!! I said to myself, “I will place this cookbook here, because I will never forget where I put it!!!!”  I have flipped the entire house upside down looking for it.

I know what I wanted to cook.  I know all the ingredients, but I do not remember how much to use for half those ingredients.  Do I invent my own recipe by guessing?  It might be great.  It might be inedible.  The recipe, for a Shepherd’s Pie, filled our nine-by-nine baking pan.  If I guess too much of this or that, it won’t fit!!

Please, I am desperate.  Can you please tell me where the “easy-to-find” place is? I assume most homes have one, but then again, I think I may not be the only one who loses things in this manner.

Sure, it would be less stressful to go online and buy another cookbook, or search for the recipe online for free.  It might not be the same, but it would be free.

But it still bothers me.  Do the ghosts in this house have telekinetic capabilities?  I have missed my Henderson clan tartan tam o’shanter for over twenty years {the ancient tartan with muted colors (ancient meaning muted colors to match what types of dyes they may have had at the time}, mostly pale green and a medium blue).  I have the necktie to match!  I have not moved furniture in that room…  maybe.

But maybe, “easy-to-find” does not exist.  We place things there for safekeeping and they never return.  Maybe they do not return for a reason.  Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount to store up treasures in heaven where moth and rust cannot get to them.  He didn’t say “or you put them in the ‘easy-to-find’ place,” but that may have been implied. Jesus was great about giving us enough information that we could, ourselves. figure out what else applied to what Jesus said.

As for the Shepherd’s Pie that I wished to make for my wife and I, I have found an online recipe that seems rather bland in comparison to what I had made several times.  I am going to add some rosemary and thyme to the online recipe and maybe substitute Parmesan for the cheddar as a topping, or maybe use both.  Yep, maybe losing the cookbook could be a good thing.  God can bless us when we cannot find that lost coin, too.

I know, Jesus was talking about losing a lost soul. There is much rejoicing when that lost soul comes to their senses and finds their way home, but as for the literal story of a lost “thing,” it might be an important lesson if the lost “coin” remains lost.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.