Normally, I have a good handle on where my belongings are, but recently I’ve been misplacing things. I’ve been forgetting a lot of things lately, like hats, glasses and keys.  In early June, I couldn’t find my ball cap.  No big deal, right?  Well, not to me! – this ball cap is the only one I have ever found that fits my melon!  I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it.

The good thing is, I’m pretty good at retracing my steps and finding things.  So, I thought maybe I had taken it up to our trailer in May and left it there.  I took comfort in that thought.  But later in June when we were there, the hat didn’t turn up.  I was at a loss to know where it might be, but mainly upset that I had lost this one-of-a-kind (at least in the known world) ball cap that fits my head.  I’ve since found it (a month later) in a mostly unused compartment of my computer bag.

I have also lost my reading glasses on a number of occasions in the last few months. One of those times I never did find them again.  So last week when I came home from a board meeting and couldn’t find my newest pair, I definitely was perturbed.  I searched high and low.  In the morning, I found them in a room at the church – they had been clipped to my shirt and evidently fell off when I was moving tables.

This Sunday, however, was a record day for me in the “leaving things behind” department.  It started when I woke up and I forgot to take my pills … first time I’ve done that.  And I didn’t realize I had forgotten until the next day!  I also forgot a video camera we needed for a baptism at church.

But to top it all off, when we were leaving for church, I couldn’t find my keys.  We searched everywhere until finally we just had to go.  What really bugged me was not being able to figure out where I could have left them.  We were two streets from home when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my bike rack on the back of the car.  At that moment I remembered!  The day before I had put my keys on the trunk when I took my bike off the rack.

We stopped the car, but the keys weren’t on the trunk.  So we drove slowly back the way we came, and sure enough, they were lying in the middle of the road. They had slid off the trunk when we made the first turn off our street.

All this misplacing, forgetting, leaving things behind bothers me.  I don’t like it.  It makes me feel like I’ve blown it.

So I wonder how we‘ll feel when we get to heaven and realize we’ve left not someTHING but someONE behind.  I know we can’t make people follow Jesus, but if we forget, or neglect, or miss opportunities to tell them, isn’t it like we’ve left something behind?  God hasn’t asked us to do His job (saving people) but He has called us to tell others about Him, and in doing that, we’re not leaving people we care about behind. I need to be better at this.

Until Next Time!

Pastor Paul

Question: What could you say to point people in your life to follow Jesus?  Leave your comment below.