One of our Sisters lost her cell phone. She would be set back terribly in her professional work if she did not find it. Besides, where would she find the money to buy a new one? She had calls to make and could not do it. Lots of stress and distress. The last time she had touched the phone was in a church two hours away, to turn it off. My mind went to the suspicious. There was a family with small boys behind us. Did one of them sneak an entry into her purse?
Unexpectedly Sister had met a friend at the church. At the discovery of the loss, Sister called her friend to ask her to look for it in and around the pew where we had sat. A telephone call came this morning: would the friend say she couldn’t find it? (If someone else had found it, it could be gone forever.)
The cell phone was found in the sacristy of the church. Whoever had found it at the pew had placed it in a safe place where the owner could find it.
The loss of a cell phone is an every-day kind of grief that takes place for all of us sooner or later. It’s just a tiny example of the many sufferings of life. In her book, The Emergent Christ, Ilia Delio makes a big point that suffering is connected with love. God is love. How can one embrace the suffering from having lost one’s cell phone? On hind sight, at least, one can see points of love in the story above. The friend was there for Sister. The one who found it respected that the owner would be delighted to have the phone.
