Lost or Found

Luke 15:31-32 New International Version (NIV)

31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

In 1988, Dave and I took our daughters on a trip to Scotland.  While there, we visited St. Giles Cathedral where I bought crosses for my daughters, my mother and me.  I thought it would be very symbolic that the five of us had identical crosses from St. Giles Cathedral because Scotland is our ancestral home.  And St. Giles is like the mother church for Presbyterians.

I treasured that necklace but worried that I might lose it some day, so I took it to a jeweler to have him solder the sliding loop which attached the cross to the chain.  While walking across the parking lot with the necklace in the little brown envelope, the cross slipped out.  I didn't notice it was missing from the envelope for several days.  When I went back to the jeweler and the parking lot, it wasn't there.

I have mourned the loss of that symbolic tie that bound me, my mother and my daughters to our ancestral home until I taught a class last fall on crosses.  We were to bring in a cross that meant a lot to us.  Again I thought back to my missing cross.  In the class, Debbie related a similar story of a cross that had been her mother's that she had lost.  I started thinking about the missing crosses and the hymn Amazing Grace kept going through my head.  "I once was lost but now am found"  The flip side of losing something so precious, is someone else may have found it.  And, it may have come to them at a low point in their lives.  Hopefully the warm feelings and love that were attached to that cross were passed on to them.  Now, I am at peace and don't think of it as being lost, but rather found.

Jaclyn Morgan