Contact Lens Found

FOUND: a needle in a haystack? No, a contact lens in the sand.

My husband and I decided to go the beach one beautiful morning last summer, at the start of our ten-day holiday together. The day was delightfully warm and we thought that having a refreshing swim would be just the perfect thing to do.

We drove to the nearby lake, had a leisurely stroll on the sandy beach, and stretched our towels close the water. There were hardly any people around as we swam towards the middle of the lake in the crystal clear, delightfully warm water. From a distance the beach looked like a postcard against the blue sky.

We got out of water and stretched ourselves on the towels to dry, when all of a sudden a gust of wind appeared from nowhere, sweeping a cloud of sand with it. My husband jumped up in obvious discomfort and, kneeling down, popped one of his contact lenses out. “The sand got into my eyes!,” he said, squinting. But the wind kept blowing and by the time he cleaned his eye with one hand and was ready to put back the contact lens in, it was nowhere to be seen.

The situation looked grim—the contact lens was not a standard item but had been specially manufactured for my husband’s left eye after special surgery. He couldn’t see very well without it.

We started to look around. I carefully examined all the towels, the clothes lying around, the bag. Nothing. By that time my husband said with pain in his voice: “How will I manage?”

But then something happened. When I heard this cry for help in his voice, I recalled a similar situation I once read about in the Sentinel, where the author relied on prayer and found what they had lost. I suddenly felt the overwhelming certainty of the all-knowing presence of God. I just had a total conviction that He knows where all things are and that nothing can be lost to Him. There is nothing in the entire universe that He doesn’t know about. In a split-second I knew that it wasn’t an impossible task to retrieve the lens, for my only role was to become a channel for God’s “all-knowingness.”

With this firm resolution I felt a rush of bubbling, creative thoughts, as I examined the scene again. My husband was still kneeling in the same position, and we hadn’t moved anything. Everything looked suspended in time, like a video after you press the pause button. It was logical to think that the lens must have been blown off his hand the same direction the wind was blowing, so I carefully started to examine an area of the sand a meter and a half to the left of our towels. I continued telling myself that nothing is impossible to God.

Then all of a sudden something round glistened in the sun. I lowered my head close to the sand in order not to disturb anything. And there it was! Resting on the surface of the sand, more than a meter away from the towels, was the contact lens.

When I handed it to my husband I couldn’t help but notice the elation on his face. We were both ecstatic. And we were also very much aware that something truly spectacular has just taken place before our very eyes. To me it felt like God was gently nudging both of us, showing Himself in a way that was difficult to ignore.

The glow I felt stayed with me for days. It was the conviction of the loving presence of God all around.