Yesterday had its challenges. The day started off with cold, misty weather (and never stopped I might add). Meetings filled my morning. My new laptop computer for work wasn’t working as it should. We had a fire drill (recall the cold, misty weather mentioned above). But after all of this, the real challenge of the day hit me.

As I mentioned, I had meetings in the morning and one of my duties is to take minutes in our leadership team meeting. Since my computer wasn’t set up completely, I had to type the minutes in Wordpad instead of Microsoft Word. That program has its own set of challenges which made my minute taking pretty miserable.

After the meeting, I saved the document to the desktop of the laptop since I couldn’t save it to my private drive on our server.

After the fire drill and lunch, our IT gal finished the set up on my laptop. It was good to finally have everything at my touch and it all seemed normal again.

Until the time for me to work on the meeting minutes from the morning.

They were gone. They were not on the laptop desktop. I ran a search. I looked in every folder. They simply were not there. This is when my stomach began turning into knots and a sense of dread washed over me.

Another call to our IT gal. She began her search remotely (which is pretty cool if you’ve never experienced that before). She too was unable to find it.

She then remembered that when she first started working on my laptop earlier, it wasn’t connected to the right server. It had connected to the main server that no one should have been able to log into. She logged me back in to that server and there it was. My meeting minutes! I was ecstatic. The lost had been found.

There is an entire chapter of Jesus’ teaching on finding what is lost. Luke 15 contains the parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7), the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8-11), and the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32).

There are several lessons to learn from these parables and probably more than I have time to share here, but take a look at a few.

The first lesson I see is that when we realize we are lost and not living within God’s guidelines, we are to repent. We are to turn away from that particular sin in our life that is hindering us from a close relationship with our Heavenly Father.

These three parables speak of rejoicing when the lost is found. When a repentant heart finds its way back to God. That is just as it should be.

Another lesson we learn about the lost is that we cannot stop looking for it. The shepherd continued his search until the lost sheep was found. The woman persisted in looking for the coin until it was found. The father apparently continually looked for his son to return, for when the son was still far off, the father ran to him.

These three parables show us that we cannot give up on searching for the truth of God’s message. Without it in our lives, we may as well be eating slop with the pigs. Keep searching. God is waiting patiently for you.

And finally, I believe we learn that we must share this Good News with others. The shepherd, the woman, and the father gathered all of the friends together and asked them to rejoice. There were great celebrations. What was lost was found and they couldn’t contain their joy.

These three parables show us that we cannot keep this secret. We must share the Gospel with others. We must ask others to rejoice with us. We must acknowledge that the lost has been found.

I don’t know that I went this far with the finding of a small document on my laptop, but I certainly was happy. I didn’t have to recreate something out of nothing by memory (which is a very good thing!).

However, when speaking of the lost of this world, I must rejoice when a wandering one comes to know Jesus. I must continue to share the Good News of Jesus to those who need to hear it and I must be persistent in seeking those who are lost. It’s exactly what Jesus did.

I pray your day will be filled with searching, finding, and rejoicing. I look forward to a day just like that.

Grace and peace be yours in abundance,

Donna

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