The View From Wisconsin

One of the worst things about moving, at least, to me, is that sick feeling in your stomach that you get when you thought you brought something with you to your new home - but upon a search of all the boxes, bins, bags and what-not, you can't find them.

This probably stems from me losing things in various moves from house to house when I was growing up - though some of it wasn't my fault, thanks to a poor plumbing job at this house we had out on the far west side of Racine.

Unfortunately, the sickening feeling hit me hard about a month after we moved up here to Merrill. Sarah and I were talking to the pastor of a church in the area, and I mentioned a friend of mine from Nashville, Mark Hollingsworth. He recently wrote a book, Embracing The Gray, that I was simply floored over after reading - mostly because of all of his work with the Christian rock band Petra. Of course, his description of his first meeting with a then-little-known group called U2 wasn't exactly fluff, either.

It turns out the pastor we met knew Mark from his Wheaton College days. I was going to try to find my copy of the book to share with him at church the following Sunday - but when we got home, neither Sarah nor I could remember where we had put it.

Sarah had the book on her "to be read" stack on her nightstand back at the old condo in Pewaukee, along with an autographed copy of Amy Grant's biography, Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far. Somehow, in all the moving and packing, those books (along with, I think, one or two others) got misplaced. Sarah swears she remembers packing the books in a box, but can't recall which one.

My greatest fear is that the books got inadvertently sent to the wrong place - namely, they are now sitting on the bookshelf of the Pewaukee Goodwill at a discount price. Aside from my continuous pleas in prayer for the condo to sell and for Sarah to find work, I'm begging God to help me find those two books.

To lose something in a move isn't unusual - my former computer desk in the basement is proof of that - but to lose books written by two people who have been inspirations to me (yes, Mark, you inspired me to want to throw catfish onto the ice ;) has been frustrating.

Now, I'm not begging anyone, but you might notice that I put a link to Amazon for both of those books. I'll let you put two and two together on that. Still, I hope and pray that I will eventually find those books. If not - well, there's always the memories I have of both individuals. Both of whom I dearly miss seeing.

EDIT: Found them both. They were in a box that I mistakenly believed was from another room in our house.