The inner voice

Last Sunday Robin lost her keys at the church building.  This is very bad because we have our vehicle, house and building keys on the same keychain.  We did a search of the building before we left to try to find them… no good.
Then I went back a couple more times during the week to look… still nothing.  I even did a thorough search of the building and grounds (even places Robin wouldn’t have gone)… STILL nothing!  All the while, we were praying and asking God to show us where they were.
We concluded that someone must have either stolen them or taken them accidentally.  But when we asked our team, no one had them.  NOW WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
Last Sunday when I was first looking, I had this random thought to go through the trash and look for the keys.  But no one wants to do that… that’s just nasty!  If I felt this about looking under the refrigerator, or going through the kids room toys or something like that, no problem.  But going through the trash?  No thanks!
Robin often puts her keys on the coffee table in the church (while we’re cleaning up after the service), and there is a trash can at the end of the table with an open top.  At the end of the service we just wrap up the trash bag and toss it in the container.
It’s my son’s job to take the trash bags to the container and to put the container out on the curb for trash pickup on Monday morning.  Last Sunday he took the trash out to the container, but he forgot to take the container out to the curb.  I ended up having to buy two special garbage bags from the city to put the trash in so we would have room for this weeks’ trash.  I was pretty frustrated… such is life with a teenager in the house :-)
I still had this nagging thought to go through the trash (which wasn’t taken away last weekend) and look for the keys.  I was ready to give up looking last night when this thought came to me again… this time very strongly.
I went out and dug through the trash (YUCK!)… still nothing.  Then in the last trash bag I didn’t find anything.  But I felt I should just shake it up a bit more and feel around the bottom of the bag to see if I could feel anything even remotely resembling keys.  To my surprise (and joy), there they were!  They must have fallen off the table into the trash and no one noticed.
It was the Holy Spirit all the time trying to get my attention.  If I had just obeyed that voice the first time, it wouldn’t have been so time consuming or gross.  And by showing us where they were He saved us hundreds of Euros (car keys are expensive to replace because of the chip inside them).
We have to get better at hearing and obeying this “voice.”  God wants to lead and direct us, but we have to be open to the different ways He uses to accomplish this.
When you don’t know what to do, the best answer is to just get quiet and pray.  God is always speaking.  He wants to reveal Himself to us, and to answer our questions, whether it’s for lost keys or something much more important.  But we have to be in a position to hear.