1983 March/April issue Part 3

A little lesson about things temporal and eternal

I am upset when things are lost. Even small things. I like to know that things have places and are in them. It’s much worst when something like a manuscript is lost. I had worked for a number of weeks on a certain piece, and when I went to do the final rewriting it was gone. It just wasn’t anywhere. I looked, then Lars looked, then we both looked. In all the likely and all the unlikely places.  We prayed about it of course, together and separately, but we could not find it. At last I told the Lord that if a I did not find it today I would begin again from scratch, as the deadline was closing in. that day Uncle Tom, who is 89 and was staying with us, became very ill. There was no time to think of manuscripts. The next day we happened to move a piece of furniture and discovered that moths were doing their dastardly work underneath it. Lars went out and bought a can of moth spray and proceeded to fumigate every nook and cranny. The manuscript was behind a desk. It had fallen down and lodged standing up on the baseboard. If Uncle Tom had not gotten sick I would have done a day’s unnecessary work on that piece that I was so worried about. If the moths had not taken it into their tiny heads to chew up my carpet, we probably would not have turned up that sheaf of papers until next spring. It was not for nothing that the collect in my church that Sunday (the eighth after Pentecost) was: ‘O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us your mercy, that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we not lose the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who loves and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.'