Finding What You've Lost | Good News Unlimited
Finding What You’ve Lost
Sep 25, 2022 1504
Finding what you’ve lost is one of the key themes of life. We’ve all lost things we value. We’re all somehow looking for them
I want to tell you a personal story. It happened in two parts, separated by more than 40 years of my life.
I’ve always had a lazy left eye. My left eye never focuses on anything. Everything is always fuzzy.
When I was a little kid, around seven years old, an eye doctor tried to strengthen my left eye by forcing it to work. To do that, for a year, I had to wear a patch over my good eye to force my left eye to work. I had to do that for a year.
Meanwhile, so that I could see anything at all out of my left eye, I had to wear glasses with some pretty strong lenses.
But one day I lost my glasses. I’ve never been very good at finding things, just ask my wife. And that was just as true when I was little.
I looked high and low in the unit where we lived but couldn’t find them anywhere. I was desperate.
I knelt down beside my bed and asked Jesus to show me where the glasses were. Don’t ask me how, but as soon as I stood up, I knew where my glasses were. I went outside our unit to the windowsill on the landing just outside our front door, and there they were!
At seven years old, I understood that Jesus was there for me, and that he cared about the small things in life. I also understood that Jesus would help me find what I had lost. He was the Great Finder.
And then, over the next few decades that went by, I wondered, why did God choose to answer that prayer of mine in such a dramatic way, when other prayers later on didn’t seem to get answered.
So now we fast forward to a few years ago.
Now I was a grown man. Although other people didn’t see it, I had been deeply wounded by life, and I had lost my identity a long, long time ago.
One weekend, I happened to be at a board retreat for Good News Unlimited. We were up on a farm at Peachester, a beautiful spot on the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
We had a break during our programme, and after the break, I was due to present the next session.
I started to panic!
During the 45-minute break, we went on a reasonably long walk along a four-wheel drive track through the forest.
It had been raining so the ground was muddy and wet. I also remember that at some stage during the walk I had taken my jacket off and tied it around my waist.
When we got back to the room where we were meeting, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my glasses on me, and I couldn’t find them anywhere. And they were very expensive.
I needed my glasses to do any reading whatsoever, and I needed them to present the next session. I started to panic, because I realise that I must have dropped them somewhere along the track.
But you know what this faith-filled group of directors did? They gathered around in a circle, and put their arms around me, and prayed that these glasses would be found.
Praying certainly hadn’t been on my mind while I was panicking.
Then they said, “Let’s go back to find those glasses of yours.” I thought to myself, “What’s the point? There are metres of track, and the glasses are of the thinnest possible rimless kind. It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.” I didn’t realistically think we had a chance of finding them.
But I also thought, “How kind and gracious these people are to break their programme in the hope of finding my glasses, when I had completely given up hope.” And being multifocal, they were quite expensive!
The Great Finder is still at work!
After praying, and despite my unvoiced reservations, we went to the ute. A couple climbed in the front, and three of us climbed on top of the tray to keeplookoutout, and we started slowly covering the track that we had walked before.
The further along the track we drove, the more I was sure my glasses wouldn’t be found. And if they were, what were the odds that we wouldn’t have run over them and crushed them anyway?
And then as we neared the end of the track and I was feeling quite vindicated in my hopelessness, someone alongside me in the tray of the ute shouted, “Stop!”
He got down, and there were my glasses, completely undamaged except for a tiny scratch.
I learnt that day that the Great Finder is still at work in my life. God sent me a powerful reminder that if he cares for the little things I’ve lost, he cares so much more for the big ones. And that’s true for your life as well.
If you trust in Jesus, everything you’ve ever lost will be found, and everything that’s ever died in your life will be resurrected. Never, ever give up your hope in him.
The Great Finder never ever loses anything. He’s still at work finding and restoring all that has been lost. He says of his children in John 10:28.
“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
– Eliezer Gonzalez
