Lost Things
“We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!’” Luke 15:32 NLT
The fisherman at the edge of the water handed me a small lightning whelk that he had picked up earlier that morning. “I like the broken ones – I find them interesting.” This one wasn’t broken - it was perfect. A fluid curve tucking into itself. “You keep this one,” he continued. I’m here all the time.”
The back bed of his small covered pick-up was filled with fishing gear and sand-covered pieces of recently washed up trash. He nodded in the direction of two other men in four-wheelers who sat chatting in the early morning light; their version of meeting for coffee I supposed. "Those of us with vehicles pick up the trash that washes up,” he said, explaining the odd items of debris in his truck: broken sunglasses, rope, a shoe, a blue shard of plastic.
A tropical storm had blown through over the past two days; heavy rain falling, a steady wind blowing. The beach was littered with tree branches, mounds of seaweed, and shells – thousands and thousands of shells.
My beloved niece Elizabeth, when her children were little, absolutely disarmed me one Easter afternoon as she hid Easter eggs. My experience hiding Easter eggs (hard-boiled, Paas-dyed) involved tucking one in the hole at the bottom of the sourwood tree, balancing one on the low hanging v-shaped branch of the dogwood, resting one in the bowed leaves of the liriope.
Elizabeth’s enthusiastic version was to walk out the back door, sling the basket of plastic eggs left and right, dumping them right in the open grass for everyone to clearly see, coming back inside and yelling, “Okay kids, go get them!”
Well, the shells on the beach were the storm’s version of Elizabeth’s Easter egg hunt. They were scattered everywhere in plain sight – easy picking.
This wet morning, they glistened in the sunlight, their colors set off by the glitter of mica. Another gentle wave would wash over my feet and more shells would tumble forward in front of my steps. There was no option but to reach out and pick them up in wonder. So beautiful.
As I gathered shells in the plastic bag the fisherman had given me, I started noticing the odd bits of trash nestled against the seaweed. I ignored it at first. But then a white plastic fork called to me. “Pick me.” I dropped the fork into my bag along with my growing collection of giant heart cockles, calico scallops, and sand dollars.
And then I found it. The thing that changed my thinking. It was a blue bubble filled with glitter floating in liquid. A ring. Obviously, a ring that had belonged to a small mermaid. I slipped it onto my little finger. It would only go as far as my second knuckle. Apparently, mermaids are extremely small because I have very small fingers and this didn’t begin to fit. And that was when I realized… this is not trash – this is a lost thing. This belonged to someone. And now it is displaced. Alone. Separated.
I started wondering; Did the little mermaid cry when she realized her blue magical ring was gone – slipped off her finger and buried in the sand? Was the fisherman sad when his favorite fishing glove dropped unnoticed from his pocket and was carried away by the waves? How frustrated was the snorkeler that his goggles fell off the boat and disappeared into the depths?
Lost things. It changed my thinking. It changed my attitude. I wasn’t sure what lesson I would pull out of this new discovery but I was sure there would be one.
And there it was last night, in the parable Jesus told of the lost younger brother. The brother who rebelled and took off on his own self-centered journey. The brother who had squandered everything; who came home a disgrace and stinking of pigs.
“… And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.” Luke 15:20
Ah ha. How easy it is for us, in our own shell-strewn life to look at those who are broken and bruised – those who don’t fit in with the rest of the shiny shells, and quickly dismiss them, to leave them behind. Discarded, worthless. It is all too easy to view them with judgment. Anger. Resentment. How dare they litter our landscape - an eyesore on our glittery, abundant shell walk?
What if, instead of being trash – they are simply lost?
I remember the closing words of the good, generous prodigal Father (Prodigal means extravagant and refers to the father’s extravagant generosity as well as the son’s extravagant wasteful living). Those last words – not only to the older resentful brother but to us, to me, are so extravagantly welcoming, forgiving, compassionate:
“We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!’”
Lost. With the possibility, the hope of being found. What a different word. What a different attitude.
This morning I think over my conversation with the fisherman on the shore. He had come to fish, his dog by his side. But his eyes weren’t only on the sea and the tip of his bent fishing pole. He was also looking for shells. And lost things.
Question: How do you see those in your life, in your path, who don’t fit in; those who appear to be outsiders, sinners, worthless, trash? How did Jesus see them?
New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.