Useless wallet - Devotion for 8/9/07

Useless Wallet – Devotion for 8/9/07

If you read the devotion from Monday of this week, then you will know that this past weekend I lost my wallet while we spent some time up at the Kings Dominion Theme Park near Richmond, VA. This week has been a frustrating exercise in calling and canceling credit cards, getting a new driver’s license issued, getting the paperwork to get a new social security card (mental note to NEVER keep that in a wallet again), getting a new Food Lion MVP card, getting a new Best Buy Rewards Zone card, getting a new . . . you get the point. At home this week we have even answered every single telemarketing calls – even the ones that show up on caller ID as being from a credit card company – just because we are concerned someone is trying to use our stuff. A thousand times I have replayed different scenarios as to where my wallet could have been, and I have checked and rechecked every piece of baggage that we had with us on the trip looking for it.

So yesterday evening as I left the house to go to church for Bible Study (Wednesday nights – 7:00 PM – come join us when you’re in town!), I went to the mail box and I found a small manila envelope with no return address. Just looking at it, I got excited because of what appeared to be the size and shape of the contents of said envelope. With the excitement of a child on Christmas morning I tore into that package (receiving a nice gash on one of my fingers from the metal clasps, by the way), and I found my wallet – fully intact! Every single card, every single picture, every single dollar bill that had been in there to begin with was still there. I looked inside the envelope and there was no note at all – and like I said there was no return address either. Someone apparently had found it somewhere and decided to be an anonymous Good Samaritan, and it was sent back to me exactly as I had left it.

I was overjoyed at receiving this blessing. I was overjoyed because I now have all my family pictures back. I was overjoyed because in my wallet I keep one of my grandfather’s business cards as a way of remembering him whenever I go into my wallet. I was overjoyed because I now back my picture of my “Pride and Joy” (it is a picture of a bottle of “Pride” and a bottle of “Joy” – the cleaning detergents – it’s a joke . . . a bad one, but still a joke). But as happy as I was about having back my wallet, I quickly realized that much of what was in my wallet had been rendered useless. Yes, the cash was still good, as was the Social Security card, but my debit card and any credit card I had in there was no longer valid. So I took all of those cards and I destroyed them. After all, what would have been the point of keeping the old cards in my wallet if I could never use them?

I thought it was interesting this morning when I did my devotion time and I read about how we as Christians can become as useless as my wallet presently is. 2 Peter 1 talks about how we need to continuously apply diligence in our faith by growing in moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. “For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins” (2 Peter 1:8-9). May we constantly press on to growing in our faith, building up the qualities listed above so that we may never find ourselves considered as useless as a once-lost wallet.