I am grateful for finding lost things

Halloween is over! That means a lot of people are doing thankful lists on Facebook now. I saw them this morning and thought, "That's nice." and then I moved on.

Specifically, I moved on to trying to find my driver's license. I tried to use my credit card on Monday and my DL was magically not in my purse. I could have said I lost it on Monday and then tried to retrace my steps from there, but really I have no idea when I used it before that and had pretty much no time frame to go on. I was supposed to meet someone at 10am today, and the clock was slowly (quickly) moving past that. Still, I was feeling fairly chill about things, but I definitely put in a few prayers. After 45 minutes of searching, I called my friend and she came to pick me up instead.

When I arrived back at home, I resumed my search. As I ruled out more and more places, I felt more and more frantic, and of course my prayers took on a more frantic note, too. I have specific reasons to need my license soon, and I didn't really want to spend a whole day at the DMV trying to replace it. However, I kept feeling like if I would just clean up the floor right around my bed, I would find it. My panic mode search system went like this:

1. Hang up a sweatshirt from off the floor by the bed.

2. Eat Halloween candy.

3. Look in a stack of papers in the living room that came out of a box of things from two years ago.

4. Eat yogurt.

5. Let the dog outside.

6. Recheck some coat pockets.

7. Check which local DMV offices have available appointments within the week (none of them).

8. Hang up another sweatshirt from the floor by the bed. (It gets cold, okay?)

Clearly, this was going well. After more of this productive cycle, I finally buckled down to really finish hanging up that sweatshirt collection, and as soon as I did, lo and behold! My driver's license! Luckily, I was already kneeling because I was going through things on the floor, and my thank-you prayer was just about as giddy as I had been frantic before. I wanted to tell everybody how blessed I was. So I pulled up my Facebook page and thought about how sometimes God likes to trick me into doing important-for-me things that he knows I'm not paying enough attention to do on my own.

I am probably not going to post a thankful thing every day, but Extra Gratitude Month definitely has my attention now. Thanks to my lost driver's license, I'm focused now on counting my blessings. The re-centering was needed, and that deserves another thank you prayer.