My Lost Camera

On two international trips, I have had cameras stolen.  In one instance I was in Aswan, Egypt and had  some great picts I didn’t want to lose.  I left my camera in a church building along with a half dozen much better cameras belonging to other people.  When we came back from break, mine was gone.  Mine may have been the WORST camera, but it turns out that it was closest to the outside door!

So, imagine my disappointment when I pay by pocket and find the camera missing.  I recalled taking a picture of the scores of bikes here at Oxford, and then we went into a tourism shop and bought some tickets for the walking tour starting in about 5 minutes.  I ran, literally, back to the tourism shop and asked if I had left it there. 

“No”, they said. 

So then I ran all the way up to our room and searched frantically.  NO camera.  I grabbed my phone and ran to rejoin the tour, now in progress.

The whole 105 minutes of the tour I listened and asked my usual score of questions, but in the back of my mind were those missing pictures, which I deemed irreplaceable.

After the tour ended, we happened to be near the tourism office where I might have left the camera.  I needed to ask another question, go figure, so we went back in.  After I had asked my question, Brenda asked the new person behind the desk whether they might have found a camera.

“Would you describe it?” came the reply.

My heart leapt.  IF they needed a description, perhaps my lost sheep of a camera had been found.

Here is what I described:

“I think we have, back here, something that was found.”

My heart rejoiced only slightly less than the woman who had found the lost coin, or the shepherd who had left the 99 sheep in search of the missing one.

My old, beat up, $40 camera I had carried almost every day in Africa, had been found.

I immediately took it back to our hotel and down-loaded the new picts to my computer.  No use taking any chances!  I went ahead and posted the photos to Facebook, in case anything happened to my computer.

Thanks be to G^d that what was lost has been found.

Think of the rejoicing in heaven, when one lost soul is found!