I was tired and had nodded off while on the tram. When I arrived at my destination, I was startled awake and barely made it off in time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after my dentist appointment that I realized I’d left my laptop on the tram! Yikes! Work files from the last 20 years were on that laptop, along with the backup drives in the bag with it—now all lost! I felt about 5 centimeters high, or as the saying goes, so low I’d have to reach up to scratch a worm’s ankle. I began to berate myself, recalling how my wife had warned me to leave the laptop at home. The conversation replayed in my head: “You might lose it.” “Nah,” I’d answered, “not me.”
Then the other voice, the one I call “The Living Word,” kicked in: If you ask anything in My name, I will do it. Ask, and it will be given to you. Whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.1
In that particular dilemma, it was easy to know what to ask for. I called my friend Andy and told him my plight and we prayed together for the laptop to be retrieved. I gave the situation to God to take care of, praying “continually,” as the Bible says.2 It was all I could do anyway. I could bang my head against the wall screaming in remorse, or I could go to my next appointment. I opted for the latter.
After the dentist, I boarded another tram and headed to my next destination. I was still thinking and talking to God about what had happened when I spotted a young girl moving up to the driver with a familiar-looking bag in her hand! My laptop bag! Ecstatically, I ran up to her and explained what had happened and recovered my laptop. I thanked her profusely for finding it and gave her an Activated magazine as a token of my appreciation.
I calculated that 33 trams had passed that stop during the time my laptop was lost. What were the chances of boarding the exact same tram and finding my laptop after it had been lost for three hours?
Having faith in God doesn’t mean that we’ll always recover lost items or have all our prayers answered, but we can know that He will be with us and help us to overcome our troubles in some way. The difference faith makes is that we aren’t alone in our trials and tribulations, we have a Friend to call on!