God knew where my phone was

This blogpost could also read “I lost my phone today”.

I’ve never lost a cell phone before.  Never had that sinking feeling in my stomach when you can’t find that all important little device that keeps you connected to the world.  Years ago, I stopped typing all my appointments in on the calendar on my phone because I was annoyed that I couldn’t actually view my calendar to make an appointment while I was speaking on the cell phone.  Now that we’re living in Sweden, the country where people count the weeks of the year so everyone refers to week number 8 (the all important winter break that happens in mid February), or week 26-30 this year (those all important  summer holidays that start right after midsommar), I bought an agenda that I can actually write in appointments on the dates but also it allows me to know the week of the year.  Which is supper important.  Because when it’s my turn to preach on a Sunday, I need to know that Sunday of week 28 is my turn.

Enough about calendars.  My pocket agenda, where I write my appointments in in pencil, is safely in my purse as I arrived at church today.  It’s my phone that went missing.  How do I know this?  Well, it’s not in the pocket of my shorts that I wore as I biked over to church this morning.  That’s funny, I said to myself, no phone in the pocket.  These are new shorts I’m wearing today.  Maybe the phone didn’t fit in the pocket so I put it in my purse.  No phone in the purse.  Asked my friend B. to call my phone to see if I could hear it.  No phone ringing as she calls.  Also no answer to my phone ringing (which isn’t really a surprise, since it’s my phone; I wouldn’t expect anyone to answer it!)

What to do now?  I decided that what we really needed to do was to pray.  Not that praying for my phone was so important.  I was actually distressed that I was getting so distracted by my phone gone AWOL that we wouldn’t continue on our path to why we were at church on this Saturday morning in the first place…..and that reason being it was time to get out on the street and set up our table complete with fika (coffee and cookies), Bibles, story books for kids about Jesus, some cold juice boxes (it’s been super hot in Sweden this summer) ~ and talk about Jesus.

Our street church team that heads out to the streets every three weeks

Our street church destination ~ it's all about the cross!

So we prayed.

And I knew, in the course of those minutes spent in prayer, that God was speaking to me.  And here’s what God was saying: “ Barbara Jean, I know where your phone is.  It’s fine.  It’s just not in your pocket right now.  I’ve got it covered.  You’ll find it later today.”  When we finished praying, I said to my friends “okay, well, it’s all going to be okay.  I’m going to find the phone today.  Perhaps we should go and set up our street church station and then I’ll go looking for my phone.”  P., while listening to me, suggested that he should call my phone.  I wondered at that suggestion, but he went ahead anyway and dialed my phone.  And what to our wondering ears should we hear (okay, that’s not an original line; I stole it from the poem “Twas the night before Christmas”)……there was someone speaking Swedish….on my phone!!!

Okay, here’s where it got really interesting.  P. says “men vem ar du?” and she says ”men vem ar du?”  (Here I put on my Google translate cap:  Who are you?  Well, but who are you?)

To make a short conversation even shorter, I told the woman that I had lost my phone today while coming to church.  She asked me to describe the phone, then told me that I needed to come to the local grocery store.  When I got there, I promptly put in my ID which unlocked the phone and the two woman standing at the desk knew right away that I was, in fact, the owner of this phone.  They told me that a customer had found the phone on the street in front of the store and brought it in to the service desk.

That phone!!

I was just thanking God that He knew where the phone had been all along and wow, isn’t it amazing that the phone was intact?  As in no one drove over it on the street. 

Oh wait, Barbara Jean.  God had told you earlier that your phone was okay.  No surprise, then, that the phone was intact.

I now carry my phone in my purse all the time.  Guess my pockets aren’t deep enough.  But God is good enough.  For me.  All the time.  God is good.