insignificant significance

Dave wasn't home by 10:15 pm on Saturday night. He had worked hard all day trying to keep up with the pile of readings, papers, and looming exams by spending the day in the library- plus he had to fit in 5 hours of janitorial labor in the library after it closed Saturday evening. I thought he might have been home by now. So I called him from the comfort of my fireside seat. He answered and I could hear the wind whipping the phone and the storm in the background. He was looking for Josie's lost baby blanket.

Earlier in the day we had gone to some friends for an Easter egg hunt and brunch, and I Dave dropped me off near to home on his way to school after we were done. Being a windy day out, I was thankful for the dear knit baby blanket made by "Grandma Taylor"- my 90+ year old "adopted" grandmother in the car to wrap Josie up in. I put Josie in her stroller and when the blanket was wrapped as tightly as possible, we made our half mile trek home.

I wasn't until we were 100 meter from home I realized that the blanket was gone and Josie was beginning to throw a fit both because she was tired, and by this time, getting cold. I jogged back down the muddy trails, looking for this blanket-- so upset that I would have lost it. How could this have happened? We backtracked most of the way to a park, but with screaming reaching new pitches and the wind picking up, I decided to lift up a prayer and run back later possibly when Dave was home or possibly in the morning.

It seems a small thing to pray about, but that blanket had real significance to me. I really didn't want to lose it, and so I prayed that it would be found. It seems that prayer has been my real work lately. Much of my time is spent at home with Josie, so the outwardly exciting life that I used to live has been much adjusted as I move to the rhythms of a 10 month old and to my own exhaustion of being 3 months pregnant. I've been convicted to pray, and the list has grown long with so many deep and heart wrenching needs. Needs that I feel so helpless to do anything about. Prayer has been the only thing connecting me. So, when this little thing, a small knit blanket lost becomes the focus of my prayer life, I felt a little sheepish, but hopeful, in offering up my request.

I told Dave around dinnertime about the blanket and my plans to find it when it was light out again. But when he wasn't home at his 10:00pm expected time, I wondered if he was out looking for it. And I was right. Out in the dark and the rain, retracing my steps though the neighborhood, though the park, under the trees. I called while he was searching and had a thought that if someone were to find this little treasure, they might just hang it on something visible. I told Dave to go look at the playground-- a little ways out of the path I had taken home, and within seconds, a laugh, a "I think we're in luck" and a pronouncement that the small, white, hand knit "buggy blankey" was hung over a park bench.

A funny think to cry about, but tears did come. Overwhelmed by the kindness of Dave to go searching in a late night storm, and for the person who hung it up so we could find it, and others who left it to be found. And of course for answered prayer. It seems such an insignificant thing, compared to the other needs, compared to the struggles and questions of who God is in my own heart, but somehow a message loud and clear "I love you".

And that's all I really needed to know.