Search and Discover

Mitchell Stevens

     I hadn’t seen my phone for at least 24 hours. If there’s any time of year to break the news to your wife that we may be out $200 replacing a lost or stolen cell phone—well, the start of the Holiday Season is not it. But the sooner I let her in on the drama, the less dramatic the whole situation would be. So when Kathryn got home that Thursday afternoon, I told her my situation, and the brainstorming began anew. Was it on any of the usual surfaces? Plugged into the charger? In my car? No, no, no. And, yes, of course I tried calling it. It went straight to voice mail, even though I know it had been on when I had it last—which meant either the battery was dead or it was broken. When had I last seen it? Wednesday, before I’d gone hiking in Shelby Forest with my friend. I had put it in the open-top pouch on the back of my backpack.
     By midmorning on Friday, I was coming to terms with having to replace the phone. It wasn’t just that it had cost me commitment to a three-year contract to get it and it was uninsured. What stung the most was the likelihood of losing the 200 phone numbers stored in the memory of that little gadget. Every number I’d accumulated since I started college—including the directories of two local congregations. I’d spent at least four hours of labor, all together, entering all that data. No—I couldn’t give up on finding that phone just yet.

     I’d have to search Shelby Forest before I was satisfied it was gone. That would explain why it wasn’t ringing at all. If that’s where it was, it had bounced out of my pack and had been laying out in the woods through two frosty nights, a speck of plastic and metal on a forest floor covered with fallen leaves.

     I had another buddy helping me with errands on Friday, so I recruited him to come help me skim the trail for the wayward cell phone. Wednesday I’d hiked the three-mile loop. We would have to do that again. I checked with the ranger’s station first—no one had turned in a phone. I remembered having jumped off of a log near the end of the Wednesday hike, so we started in the opposite direction.

     A woman was finishing the trail as we were beginning. We asked her if she’d seen a cell phone. She hadn’t, and she said that she kept her eyes on the ground because she has bad ankles. Still, she could have missed it—we kept going, eyes glued to the ever-changing leaf-covered ground—walking, skimming, stopping, kicking around in circles in the leaves, pacing around trying to reconstruct the erratic two-day-old trail of Mitch the Oblivious Hiker like some pair of forensic investigators. Something about the whole thing reminded me of the widow from Jesus’ parable who had lost a valuable coin. She lit a lamp, swept the house, searched diligently until she found it (Luke 15:8-9).  Well, I could relate to the woman—at least to the point where she found her silver. Alas, for me, all the likeliest places that a phone could fall from a backpack came and went. 

     My friend and I both shrugged and said, “At least we tried.” We’d kicked and picked our way up and down the bluffs and come to the point just before the trail returned to the parking lot—the point from which I’d started Wednesday. Today, this was the home stretch. I call it The Boulevard. It’s gravel, and as wide and level as a one-lane road. Our minds had both turned to hurrying back home when a square of color caught my eye. A postcard. It almost looked like the sort of thing I would pick up from a tract rack and store in the back pouch pocket of my backpack….

     Sitting next to the postcard, neat as could be on top of the leaves, was my phone. Out in the elements, but in complete working order. (It hadn’t rung when I called it because it had no signal.) As I snatched up the phone I read the heading on the card: 

     WHAT IS GRACE?

     The card was a chart of verses about grace. Continue in it, one verse said (Acts 13:43). Grow in it, said another (2 Peter 3:18). My friend caught up to me, saw the phone in my hand. I showed him the card. He smiled. We both looked ahead, where the parking lot was only about 200 feet away. “There’s a lesson in that somewhere,” he said.

     I’ll say. What is grace? “Seek, and ye shall find.” My search that day had been overclouded with the expectation of failure. I went looking anyway. The authorities didn’t have it. Those who had walked the trail told me they didn’t see anything, but I decided to go ahead. I chose the hardest possible route, and made a frustrated afternoon out of what could have been a richly rewarding few minutes. But in the end I got what I was looking for. How fortunate I was. 

     How blessed would be the search that is a guaranteed success for all who make it. That guarantee exists in the search for truth. In grace God revealed it. The gospel of grace is here to be found, and will not be denied to the one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness (Matthew 5:6). Some may stumble across it rather early. Others may come to it through a long and discouraging search, at a point when one is disillusioned toward manmade religion, tired of wading through council-compiled creeds, and finally sits down, exasperated, to an open Bible, saying, “Just what DOES this book say?” 

        “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).

     The search for truth is a great one, and it’s even better when made with the help of companions. Would you like to search together? 

     Give me a call on my cell phone!

DIRECT BIBLE QUESTIONS TO:  Mitchell Stevens,   acts2216@midsouth.rr.com

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