Lost And Found: A Christmas Message: God Values Lost People

Lost and Found : A Christmas Message : God VALUEs people

Have you lost anything recently? Your wallet? Your keys probably? Your watch? Glasses, if you use them? How about smartphones? That is a most commonly lost item. How about your passwords? In a digital age, it becomes more important than any other item isn’t it? Railway stations and Airports have special places and processes to store and return lost property. Losing something is very common. And it is traumatic, isn’t it? Nobody likes to lose something. That is why there is a Start-up eco system developing out there where there are solutions to locate lost items. There are many digital gadgets and apps available that will help us to locate our lost items. This is becoming a good business for start-ups.

But let us try and find out answers to two questions about Lost items. First question is when do we consider an item lost? Some of you are saying “Duh”.. isn’t it obvious? When I can’t find it anymore. When it is not with me and I don’t know where it is etc.. All good explanations. Well! For sake of clarity let us try to define “lost”. Would you agree with me if I say that the simplest way of defining Lost is “When something is separated from its owner?”

The second question is when do we go looking for a lost item? We don’t do it always isn’t it? There are certain things which we do not go look for, even when they are lost. So what makes us go looking for something that is lost. The key word here is Value. We will look and see if we can find an item if there is a substantial value attached to it.

VALUE. Let us peel it a little bit more. What could VALUE mean in the context of a lost item? First letter V stands for Valuable. This is the most obvious part of VALUE. How much did it cost us. Is the item that we have lost is valuable to us? We might have paid a huge price for the item. The replacement of the item might also be expensive. Smartphones these days are not cheap and hence if we lose a smartphone, it is a huge loss. So if the item has some value attached to it we will make the effort to go look for it. The second letter is A, which stands for Attachment. If we are attached to the lost item in some way, we will certainly go out looking for it. It might be a cherished memory, it might be gift from some special person, it could be the first thing that we purchased out of our own money. Whatever the reason is, if there is an attachment to the item, we will make an effort to look for and find the lost item. The third letter L stands for Love. If the lost item is a loved item, we will make effort to look for it. The forth letter U stands for Useful or utility vale of the item. How useful was the item to you? I am at an age where I cannot read without my glasses, so if I lose my glasses, I will certainly go crazy and would want to find it as soon as possible. For some , it could even be lifesaving, like for an Asthma patient the inhaler is an absolutely useful item and if we lose that, we will go all out to try and find it. The fifth and last letter of VALUE is E and it stands for Emotional. If we have any emotions attached with an item, we are sure to make all efforts to look for it. This is similar to the Attachment that we saw earlier. There are items where we get very emotionally attached to, and we would hate to lose such an item. In the movie 102 Not Out, the character played by Rishi Kapur clings on to an old blanket because of the emotional attachment that he has with the item. So that is VALUE for us. An item that is Valuable, that we have some Attachment to, that we Love, that is very Useful to us or has a high Utility value and finally an item that we are Emotional about. So if an item has the capital VALUE, we will make all efforts to find and retrieve the item.

So we have established two things. Lost can be defined as “separated from the rightful owner” and we make an effort to seek an find the lost if the item has a VALUE in our life.

Till now, we have been talking about inanimate things. Let us get a little more serious now. Let us talk about human beings, people, you and me. Do we feel lost? Have you ever felt completely lost? Lost without hope? Lost without love? Lost thinking that you are worthless? Lost in the busyness of the word? Even if you have not found yourselves in that position, have you seen someone who is in that condition?