Staff writer
It was a miracle, really. Yesterday morning my husband found his ‘Miracle Ear’ hearing aid in the south pasture, 2 feet on the other side of the fence, more than a year, maybe even two, after he lost it.
It was lost while hunting turkeys just before a major snowfall occurred, whenever that might have been (certainly not this past winter).
It wasn’t that we did not spend a lot of time looking for it, at the time the device was lost, it is just that we gave up the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’ search after a few halfhearted attempts.
Strangely, it is often when giving up a search for something important, that it appears in plain sight.
It happened with my glasses on more than one occasion. The most memorable was the pair that had only one sidebar, making them difficult to keep in place to begin with. When a branch sideswiped my face as I was traversing the baby goat pen with a bucket of bottle and kids bopping all around me, they flew off, never to be seen again. So I thought.
A year later, as I traversed that same pen with a bucket of bottles, but a complete different set of baby goats bopping around, suddenly there they were, lying in plain sight, a bit dirty from their year spent in the outdoors, but my good old glasses, nonetheless.
At the time they were lost, I spent hours on my hands and knees in that pen, crawling to- and-fro, feeling with my hands because I really could not see well without my glasses. But I never found them. It was only a year later, after buying new glasses and completely giving up the search that they popped into view.
Kind of reminds me of a time many years ago when I gave up a search and learned how God really works in human lives.
We were trying to pack up two young children, a truckload of dairy goats, and enough feed and supplies for humans and animals to spend a fun weekend at a goat show several hours away.
Anxiety was high; we needed to leave the farm by a certain time in order to make check-in times at the show. Everything was almost loaded, when the gauntlet fell. It seems my husband insisted that we take along our large water cooler-jug so we would have something to drink and would not have to buy drinks at the show. I did not see the need to hold up the whole shebang for this one item, but it was find-the-cooler-and the-lid, or un-pack and stay home.
I looked everywhere for that big orange cooler and the white screw-on lid. Finally found the cooler, but the lid was nowhere in sight.
Frustrated I sat down on a bucket and buried my head in my hands. My four-year-old son came over and patted my back.
“It’s OK, Mommy, just pray to God and He will find it,” he said.
Oh the infinite wisdom of children. We held hands together and prayed to God our seemingly insignificant prayer.
A funny thing happened next. When I opened my eyes and looked up at my trusting young son, I saw, from that unique perspective seated on a bucket, that white cooler lid just barely visible under some boxes stacked in the corner of the garage.
Honestly, we never would have found that lid, had we not given up the search and put it all in God’s hands. Sometimes the only way to find things lost is to give up the search and see it all from a completely different perspective.