The Key

About 6 months ago I was running in the woods, as usual.  I had been doing this for a long time with my car key in my pocket.  Then I started to consider if I lost it, I'd have to pay for a new chipped key.  So I had a door key made for just a few dollars.  I had this in my pocket on this day.

I ran deep into the swamp and found a comfortable spot where I stopped for a rest, sitting on the ground.  After a few minutes I got up and made my way out of the swamp and back to the trail.  Keep in mind, that running in the swamp is not like running on a road.  You can watch one of my videos to see exactly what it looks like, but there is a lot of shifting foot work, jumping, vaulting, crawling, etc.  So I carry as few things as possible and check for them frequently.

Eventually, I reached the last big tree of my course where I usually jump from.  Upon rolling to my feet, I touched my pocket to see if the key was still there and it wasn't.  My spirits sank and I looked around on the ground.  I looked carefully, then swept leaves.  Then widened the search.  Then looked again.  It was not there.  Had I checked for it at all the other usual points?  I must not have!  So I turned back to retrace my steps.  Hopefully it was not lost off trail.

I was nearly done with the run, so I had about 7km to retrace and it was getting later in the day.  I didn't find it at any of the points on the trail, so I sighed as I realized it must have been off trail.  I knew where I had left the trail, but following the exact path would be nearly impossible.  So I prayed again for help to find it, like I had found my wedding ring years before.

In that story, my ring had slipped off in cold blackwater while diving for work.  Blackwater, if you don't know, is extremely tannic such that you literally can't see your hand in front of your face.  I watched the silver flash flip downward into obscurity.  I tried to dive for it, but couldn't see, so I gave it for lost.  My coworker insisted we try to find it.  So we left and returned nearly an hour later after haggling with a dive shop to loan us a powerful light.  With the light secured against mishap with a rope, I tried again.  Even that tremendously bright light only illuminated a narrow beam in the eternal black 3 meters down.  But I scanned the leaf litter slowly and miraculously saw a glint.  I carefully scooped it up like Smeagol finding the One and surfaced with it clenched in my outstretched hand!  The chances of finding it after such a length of time in such dark water with such a current were minuscule.  So if God could allow that, he could help me again.

But quickly I lost the trail.  Was it this log or that log? If this one, was it here or three feet to the left?  There was no key.  Soon I lost all sense of my path, so I just went back to the point I'd left the trail.

I continued the search in hopes that I might have lost it on the early part of the run, but that didn't seem likely.  I was pretty sure I'd had it when I left the trail the first time.  It must have either bounced out of my pocket, or fallen out when I sat down.  That seemed most likely.  I didn't usually do that, so I might not have checked my pocket when I got up.

The next challenge was getting home.  This place is not so much of a park, as a dirt lot with access to public land.  There's no phone.  No houses near.  It was a weekday evening, so hopefully I'd run into someone in the parking lot who could call my wife.  If not, I'd have to run across the road and 4 km down the drive on the other side to get to a ranger station.

Providentially, I spotted a couple out for an evening jog.  I saw that they had phones strapped on for training.  I explained my situation and asked if I could borrow one.  They obliged and my wife started to come with the spare key.

I thanked the people and resumed my search now having run double what I normally do.  A couple others saw my searching demeanor and asked if I was ok.  I told them and they promised to put the key in the trail box if they found it.  But I knew they wouldn't.

After getting out I had immediately had another door key made, which I now tie around my waist on a strong cord, tuck in my pants, and still check constantly.  But it's not in my nature to forget something like this. So even though I had given up all hope of finding it, I continued to check the trail box for several weeks after.  I even tried to go retrace the path a couple times and see if I could miraculously luck up on the spot and find the key.  Of course I didn't find it.

So then I was running again this week and thought of the key once or so.  I knew it was still out there somewhere in the vast swamp.  Perhaps the trophy of a crow or raccoon or other animal that likes shiny objects.  Wouldn't it be weird if I saw it like that, I thought?  Stuck in nest, or hanging from a bird's beak as it flew past.  Unlikely, but not at all impossible.

Toward the end of my run as I was getting fatigued, I climbed the last tree with the perfect perch from which to leap off.  I jumped and rolled over my left shoulder, then reclimbed to roll over my weaker right.  I have recently had to change trajectory because I've worn out the landing spot and roots were painful.  I overextended the jump a bit and came out of the roll a little awkward, further into the trail than usual.  As momentum carried me to my feet, I looked between them, and square in the middle of my black shoes, pointing down the trail was a silver key with black end.  I instantly thought my cord had come untied, but found the key secure in its place.  I grabbed the key on the ground in astonishment.  It looked just like mine.  It couldn't be!

I pulled the corded key out of my waistband and compared them.  No way!  It was MY LOST KEY!  How?  I looked everywhere here!  How could it have lasted six months right in the trail!  Had someone picked it up by chance and dropped it here?  What are the chances of that?  Had an animal truly returned it to me?  Most likely, I had dropped it in this place.  But how had it remained through driving summer rains, rapid bicycles, and countless feet, only to pop to the surface right between the feet of the very one person who had lost it?

Like any occurrence of this type, the skeptic (and I am usually with you), will ascribe it to chance.  The sap will call it a miracle.  I don't go that far.  I ascribe it to the everyday sort of mysteries in which the unseen intrudes into our mundane worlds.  The Majik, to coin a word.

These small intrusions of a greater reality are, for me, the most exciting thing.  Small love notes from a Father who says, "I am here." in a personal way that most others will not even perceive or understand.  It is a private message, like a note scribbled on a napkin in a lunchbox, meant only for my eyes, and bolstering my trust and love.

It also illustrates another principle.  That he is most truly God of the lost.  There is nothing so small that it falls from his attention, and it returns in the most unlooked for ways.  If he can save something as trivial as my lost key and bring it back to me so perfectly, so precisely, after I had given up as an irksome memory of my inattention, I can never assume anything is truly lost.  Though I may seem irrevocably far from it in space, time, or understanding it is not gone from him.  As Steve Taylor so eloquently put it, "Misfits lost in the dryer take heart; God's got a place for us in Sock Heaven."

 I think this is, well...key.