Lost Wallet
Cash, credit and debit cards, driver’s license, Social Security cards, and photos: these are mission-critical items that are carried in our wallets. If a wallet is lost or stolen, it could be said that a life is misplaced or stolen as well.
The wave of panic over a lost wallet
Canceling accounts and replacing lost identification is burdensome enough; but what if those bank cards and that Social Security number fall into the wrong hands before action can be taken? Our very identities can be stolen and then assumed by those of wicked intent. Fraud that we are innocent of can be committed ostensibly in our names; huge debts can be accrued and credit ratings can be destroyed. Yes, the dispossession of the numbers that secure our world-based lives can be tantamount to being violated physically. In some cases it would be better to suffer a car wreck than to lose or have stolen a wallet.
That wave of panic that washes over us like spilled bleach as we realize that we can’t find our wallet serves to reckon us with our earth-bound mortality. It is then that we realize that perhaps our priorities have been heinously skewed. We come to grips with the knowledge that we have been bowing to the false god of this world and the puppet masters that he himself manipulates. As the bleach of panic burns our consciences and irritates our sinuses, we lift our faces away from the irritation and up toward the one and only God who cast this false god of world finance, I.D. numbers, fraud, and greed out of Heaven. We cry out “oh, Lord, please help me to find my wallet!” We stress and lament as we voice that desperate, mournful psalm. For too many, it is only when a wallet is lost or a child is sick or other manner of tragedy strikes that they turn from the pursuits and exploits of the false god of this world and toward the Most High who created the heavens and the earth.
And should the wallet be found intact and all order becomes restored, the Most High is forgotten until the next unmanageable crisis arises that no writer of self-help books can solve or Botox-lipped, glistening-toothed life coach can game plan through.
We all – each and every one – are losing our wallets. Card by card, I.D. by I.D., dead president by dead president, number by number, we are in essence being slowly pick-pocketed. The secrets that we believe to be secure are hardly that. Our shame is being revealed but so are our hearts…
…This world will pass away and with it will the contents of our wallets. We came into this world with nothing and we will go out in the same fashion. The retirement plans and pensions will be like the contents of that lost wallet; they will be gone and most certainly into the hands of ruthless strangers.
In Jesus, the contents of our hearts endure – and they will be sustained when stored in the safe deposit box of His salvation.
