I was really looking forward to Friday afternoon, as I was scheduled to meet up with a friend for coffee at a local restaurant. I don’t get to ‘coffee shop’ it much, so the afternoon held great appeal to me, especially since I hadn’t seen this friend for a while. David and I had been scouting out a new place to live and just met with a landlord, but I watched the clock to make sure we could get to the coffee shop on time. I would meet with my friend and one of her friend’s she wanted to introduce me to, and David would go home, change clothes, and then pick up our 18 yr old son to take him to a medical clinic due to continued sickness he was experiencing.

Despite typical traffic, we made it to our destination about 5 minutes early, and I saw my friend at the entryway waving me to join her. David was just barely out of traffic, so I felt pressed to get out as fast as I could. I grabbed my bag and jumped out of the car quickly, immediately walking over to my friend who was about 10 yards away. Once inside the café gardens, we found a table and within a minute I figured out my phone was missing. Thinking I must have just left it in the car, even though I thought I remembered putting it in my bag, I went to call David. Whoops, can’t do that without a phone!

Thankfully my friend was kind enough to let me use her phone to call David who was already at our home. “No prob,” David told me. When I head to the medical clinic, I’ll drop it by on the way there.

About 30 minutes later David walked into the coffee shop, but I noticed he didn’t have my phone in his hand. “Sorry, hun. Didn’t see it in the car.” I double-checked my bag to make sure it wasn’t there, even though I was pretty sure the five times I had previously looked had been pretty thorough.

When no phone emerged after the 6^th look, I went to the car that was parked around the corner to thoroughly search it. Still, no phone. This is when my heart began to panic. Would love to say I remained as cool as a Veggie Tales cucumber, but that would be an outright lie. I literally ran back to the coffee shop, hoping that somehow my iPhone would miraculously appear in the dirt where I had jumped out of the car almost an hour previously. In truth, knew it was foolish to think it would still be there, as that area in front of the coffee shop has about 100 people walking by it per minute. Still, when you are desperate, you sometimes create pipe dream scenarios in your mind. But no amount of wishful thinking was going to make the impossible happen in this case.   My only hope was prayer. And it would be a battle, as I literally felt sick to my stomach. I had to replace panic with prayer.