Notes from the Street - #3
(Triune Mercy Center, 2024)
When I get out of my routine, I lose things.
Does this ever happen to you?
Dang, it surely happens to me.
Yep, I lose things when I’m out of my routine.
Especially my wallet.
And guess what?
I’m out of my routine.
After 17 years of beginning my day as a ‘leave before the sun rises’ public school teacher, I’m now a ‘leave at a godly hour after the sun rises’ inner-city minister.
For those 17 years as a teacher, I’ve known exactly where my wallet was every single morning and every single afternoon of every single day because I have a wallet holder nailed to the wall just inside the from door of our house that ALWAYS holds my wallet morning, noon and night.
So, imagine my chagrin, when I reached into my front right pocket just before lunch on my third day on the job at Triune Mercy Center and…couldn’t find my wallet.
My mind raced. My heart pounded. My palms sweated. My knees buckled.
“Where can my keys possibly be?” I asked myself over and over again. “I always know exactly where they are…At All Times!”
But then I didn’t.
I happened to see Robin at that very moment.
After three decades of marriage, you know something is amiss just by looking at each others faces.
She knew something was wrong with me.
“Are you alright?” she asked concernedly and kindly.
“No,” I said. I can’t find my keys,” I whispered with a crackly voice.
She knew by the look and sound of me that my heart was in my shoes.
They were.
I hate to lose things.
Have you ever seen the T.V. show The Finder starring Geoff Stults as Major Walter Sherman, (retired) who suffers a traumatic brain injury in the Iraq War and became an obsessive compulsive looker of lost things until he found them?
Well, if I lose my wallet, I become Walter Sherman.
I become the finder.
I can’t stop looking until I find what I’m looking for.
So right there on the second floor of Triune Mercy Center, I set out looking for my wallet.
In my way of thinking, there were three possible places my wallet could be.
One was in the TMC parking lot on the way to the parking place where I parked the work van.
I had gone that way with a client who needed a ride to the ER at St. Francis Hospital downtown so it was possible I dropped my wallet as I helped her out of the doors of the church, across the parking lot and up and into the doors of the van.
I searched every space in and around that van with a proverbial magnifying glass 9microscope even) 5 times, looking into every possible nick and cranny and hiding spot but to no avail.
No wallet.
Another was at the gas station beside Stone Avenue and Main Street. On the way to the hospital, my friend the client said, “Boy, I’m thirsty. I sure could use a ginger ale.” So I stopped at the store to assuage her thirst for a ginger ale and my thirst for a Diet Coke (losing things makes me thirsty).
I stopped at the store again. “Oh, hello,” said the proprietor. “It’s you again. You thirsty for another Diet Coke?” “No thank you,” I said with hope in my heart that I’d left my wallet on the counter beside the cash register.
No such luck.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “No wallet here.”
I slowly made my way back to the van looking at every possible place a lost wallet could have ended up.
I saw a young black man sitting on a brick wall in front of the van and thought for a moment in what I call ‘bad, privileged thinking,’ that maybe he found the wallet, put it in his pocket, and was getting ready to order a wish list from Amazon with my card number and information.
Just because he was a young black man sitting on a brick wall in the cool of the afternoon sun.
Isn’t it interesting that when we lose something, one of our instincts is to think that someone who doesn’t look like us MUST be the one who found it and stole it.
Do you have that inclination?
We surely don’t need have that thinking.
it’s one of the great wounds in our world today.
It’s something we all need to work on, huh?
I finally made it to the St. Francis ER.
I returned to the wheel chair area, where I had gotten a wheel chair for my friend.
I was a sight to see crawling around and through all those wheel chairs.
“Can I help you,” asked a kind old man. He’d thought I’d fallen out of one of those wheelchairs and couldn’t get up.
“No,” I said, “Not unless you can help me find my lost wallet.”
Alas, he couldn’t find it though he tried admirably.
No wallet.
I walked through the electric sliding doors to the reception desk with a look of last hope on my face and in my eyes.
“Hi again,” I said, “I dropped a friend off at this desk about 45 minutes ago and seemed to have lost my wallet. You haven’t happened to have seen it, have you?”
That heroic woman looked all over the ER for my wallet.
She asked every nurse, every staff person, every doctor, and every security guard if they’d seen it.
Each person said, “No. We’re sorry, but no, we haven’t seen a wallet.”
Forlornly, without hope of ever seeing my wallet again, overwhelmed with the thought of going through the process of getting my life back together within the fold of my wallet (a super cool, one of a kind, nerdy Marvel super hero kind of wallet I might add), I headed back out of the electric sliding door toward the wallet-less van.
Just as I was about to step outside the electric, sliding door, though, a poor, sick woman in her own wheelchair looked up at me with sparkly eyes and whispered, “Hey, you better check with the front desk again because I saw a man a while ago bring a wallet to the counter and ask whose it might be.”
What?
Oh my God.
Hope springs eternal.
Her words set off a chain of dominoes that led to a nurse on break who said, “Yes, a man found a wallet. When I asked him if he’d like for me to keep it until the walletless seeker arrived back to the admissions desk looking it he said, “No. I’ll take it. I’ll look at the driver’s license, find the name and address on it, look for his Facebook profile, and send a message to let the person know it’s in my possession and I want to give it back to him”
“Do you get that Facebook message?” asked the now returned from break nurse.
I checked my iPhone.
“No, I didn’t,” I answered.
My Encyclopedia Brown inclinations from my younger days kicked in for me.
“The Case of the Missing Wallet,” I thought to myself.
If I was that message, where would I be?
Then I remembered! (A rare and wonderful thing these days for this 50 something year old with spinning brainsyndrome).
There’s a small part of Facebook messenger that lets you access messages from people who might not be your friend on that social media site.
I clicked the three dots that gave me access to that part.
Low and behold, a message was there.
There was a picture and a phone number of a young, black man.
“I found your phone,” it read! “Call me and I can get it back to you.”
I called the number.
“Hello,” I said.
“Is this Trevor?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Yes,” I said, “Yes it is.”
“Well, I have your wallet,” the voice said. “I’ll be be glad to get it back to you. Where are you?”
“I’m at the St. Francis ER,” I exclaimed.
“Well,” said the man on the other end. “I’m at your front door ringing your door bell. But you’re not here, ha ha. Would you like for me to leave it under the mat for you?”
He did.
And there it is, my friends.
A story.
A reminder that when we lose things, even in the inner-city, where we’re apt to think that everybody is out to scam you and take what is yours for theirs, there are good neighbors all around us who want to helps and make the world a better place for all of us.
Hey, let’s give people the benefit of the doubt, no matter what they look like or where they live.
Let’s look into the eyes and the hearts of everyone with curiosity, compassion and courage.
Instead of being afraid someone is scheming to take something away from us, let’s be open to planning how we can share what we have with them.
The 3 threes (curiosity, compassion and courage) can take all that we have lost in our world today and help us find it again.