1987
My mother was an interesting woman. Born in Oklahoma in 1917, she traveled with her family in her late teens during the Depression Years to Southern California to escape the dustbowl drought in the Midwest. Her family settled in Southern California, in Compton, and worked hard to make a new life there. My mother was a devout Christian and somehow decided to attend Portland Bible Institute (an unusual thing for a woman in that era). There she met Joe Stephens, another student at PBC and an aspiring pastor in training and they were married in my mother’s church in Compton in 1941. They then moved to Eastern Oregon and lived on the Stephens family ranch near Heppner while my dad helped with the ranching and began pastoring a small Baptist Church in Spray, Oregon.
My mom was a natural-born teacher and a passionate writer. As the years passed and my dad continued in pastoral ministry, she began to write Sunday School material for churches in her denomination and also wrote many lessons, stories, and missions studies for Gospel Light and David C. Cook Christian publishing companies. If you were in an evangelical church Sunday School or Vacation Bible School in the USA in the 1960s or 1970s it’s very likely you were taught at some point from curricula she wrote.
My parents also opened our home to foster children for most of my growing-up years and sometimes my brothers Skip, Bill, and I were outnumbered by foster bothers and sisters in the house. Some of those foster relationships were lasting and deep, in fact the very first of those foster children, Jim Russell, became a life-long member of the family and was like a ten-years-older brother to me, just as I’m a ten-years-older brother to my brother Bill Stephens.
My parents eventually helped start a Boy’s Ranch for homeless and troubled boys in the early 1960s and for many years served as house parents, first on the Boys Ranch, then in a Jesus People house in Richland, WA in the 1970s. What a life! My mom, loved little children and her home was always filled with children from the neighborhood right up until the illness that hospitalized her and led to her death in the fall of 1992 (just four years after my Dad’s death in 1988).
In addition to all this, my mom developed a reputation in our family for finding lost things. When something was lost or misplaced and every possible place had been searched with no success, we’d ask Mom to pray about where it was “hidden”! She’d pray and after awhile, she’d say, “It seems like if you look between the cushions of the sofa, it might be there. I don’t know, I can just kind of picture it there.” And we’d look, and there it would be! Amazing! This happened with keys, with papers and documents, with purses and wallets, all kinds of things. My mom definitely had a “Gift for Finding Lost Things”!
In fact the reason I’m writing this story is that in 1987 when we were living in Jamaica, we lost a very important document that we needed once a year when we went to renew our Work Permit at the Ministry of National Security.
Sidebar: One of the conditions of our residency in Jamaica was that we had to be financially supported as missionaries with funds from outside the country. We used a missions service agency in Atlanta to receive the donations and support that was given for us and deposit it in our bank so we could access it. We had to present the documents showing those financial transactions and accountability each time we renewed our Work Permit. It was time to renew! We couldn’t find the document! Help!
So after practically tearing the house apart trying to find the document, in desperation we phoned my mom at her home in Southern Oregon and told her about the lost document and our situation. While I held the phone so Jean could hear as well, Mom prayed that God would show us where the document was. Then, in a few moments she said, “I think it fell down behind something. Maybe behind a drawer?” I rushed into the room where the file cabinet was, quickly took the drawers out, and there it was, on the bottom of the file cabinet at the very back. It had fallen out of the second drawer, where we thought it should be, down onto the floor in the back! Thank you God! Thank you Mom!
In the years since she passed, we’ve hoped that her special “Gift of Finding Lost Things” would somehow transfer to another member of the family. Nothing yet! But we do pray when something important is missing and we’ve exhausted the search possibilities. Just last week, I couldn’t find a Swiss Army Knife that is special to me—a gift from a friend years ago—and after searching high and low for it, we prayed that God would show us where it had gone. Then I went out to the car and looked where I had already looked before and there it was! It’s sitting right here on my desk as I’m writing this! So maybe the “Gift of Finding Lost Things” isn’t hopelessly gone!
Do you or someone you know have the “Gift of Finding Lost Things”? Have you ever lost something and prayed about it and then sort of been led right to it? I’d love to hear about it!
As always, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question or a comment simply reply to this email or if you’re reading on the blog, comment below.
Grace to you today, Jim Stephens