Before going on holiday in July every article of clothing in our home was washed. If we didn’t need it and it couldn’t be put away without ironing, it was placed in the basket for our return home and the eventually catch up in ironing. This pile of clean washing should have included the smart navy trousers that I wear for work on the days when I don’t particularly want to wear a suit. Since our return from holiday, I have looked through the basket for these trousers, and I cannot find them. Nearly two months on, I think most days I have worn a suit as I try to think what I could have possibly done with them.

The first port of call was the delicate washing that often has to hang on a clothes horse in the spare room waiting for it to dry. I’ve looked through all the dirty clothes, and in a grasping at straws moment I looked through my husband’s and my son’s wardrobe. The empty suitcases were pulled out just in case. And I’ve issued a plea on Facebook, just in case someone else has seen them. All that did was bring up a long list of items of clothing that other people had lost over the last few month.

My final option I think will be to return to our own flat at some point in the next few days, and check that they have not been left behind as we packed at the end of the holidays.

Tomorrow is all about “lost and found”, and I realise how lacking in vigorous searching I must be. The Biblical stories of Luke 15: 1 – 10 speak of the desperate and continual searching until the item is found. Jesus speaks to the crowd as though the searching of the woman and her coin and the shepherd and his sheep are the searches of normality. And yet they are most definitely not. They are the searches of livelihood. Without the coin, the woman is destitute. Without the sheep, the shepherd is poor.

These are stories that are hard to understand in our disposable society. So much of what we own is easily replaced, or often ignored. Take my trousers, perhaps if they had been the only pair of trousers I owned I would have made the journey to our own home sooner. Instead I have several pairs, although the missing are my favourite.

But to be lost and to be found by God, speaks of the worth of humanity to the praise of God. All matter, all are valued, and each is sought until they take their place at the heart of God.