Sophie and the Lost Car Keys

I want to tell you a story about our daughter Sophie and the lost car keys. Two lost car keys actually. Two lost car keys, a faith-drenched six year old girl, and a harried, hurried father riven with casual unbelief (that would be me!).

So here goes.

Our lovely daughter Sophie is getting married to Cameron next month. She’s a wonderful girl, a gifted, kind and servant-hearted follower of Jesus. And to be honest I can’t really remember a time when that was not true of her. I will be proud to walk down that aisle with her on my arm, and will be honoured to hand her over to an equally fine, young Christian man.

And of course, at times such as this, you reminisce. You cast your mind back to the stories and the times. The trials and the tears. The sleepless nights and occasional (very occasional) visits to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning.  I remember the day she was born, and being riven both with deep joy, but also with the subterranean dark fear of something – someone – so precious that I barely knew, being lost to me.

Yet by God’s grace we are a month away from her getting married.  And as father of the bride you start to think about what you might say about your daughter when you give that speech. I thought of beginning it “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…” but I can sense the eye-rolls already. In fact as an Irishman of a particular linguistic dexterity – not to mention a bombastic personality – it’s more a case of “Unaccustomed as I am to shutting up.”

(By the way, I’ve had more than the occasional tap on the leg under the table by my long-suffering wife Jill, whilst regaling dinner party guess with my obvious, and long-winded, wit).

Still, I have some stories and events mulling around in my head. Whether this one makes the cut on the wedding day, I do not know, but for what it is worth, it’s a story I have told of her often in churches, and it is one that, even today, shook me out of a immanently-framed slump. So here it is in blog form.

By the way, you know what I mean by “immanently framed” – don’t you? That view of reality in which “this” is all there is, and that the materialist perspective of reality, in which no invisible spiritual realm exits that intersects with, or counters, our physicality, is the default position of life.

As Christians in such a world, a modern world run according to modern standards with a modern sense of time, and a modern design for self-improvement and self-focus, it is easy to drink this particular and particularly poisonous Kool-Aid.

Yet “deep time?”  “Thin spaces” where the gap between the seen and unseen realm is as light as gossamer? These times and spaces either elude us, or we elude them, I’m never sure which.

If it is the former, then it is because we have allowed ourselves to be shaped by modernity and materialism. If it is the latter then it is because we are scared of what might happen in our lives if deep time and thin spaces invade our realities, upsetting our categories and jesting our concocted wisdom.

Which brings me to back to Sophie and the car keys. When she was around six and going to school -, and Jill and I were generally both rushing off to various work places or meetings -, I did the usual of grabbing her school bag, her lunch box, her coat and her.

And then I did the usual dad thing of jamming that all in the back seat of the car about three minutes after I was supposed to have done so. Again. And then strapped her into her booster seat, all without jamming her, or at least trying not to. Let the (dad) reader understand.

So I strapped her into her seat, ready to head off to school. And then I grabbed the car keys off the back seat so I could dive around the side of the car, throw myself in and get her there in some vaguely Protestant fashion.

Problem. The keys were not there. I could not find them.  I groaned. Checked the floor. Checked the front seat. Ran back into the house. Nothing.

Rage threatened. But I calmed down. I grabbed her out of the chair (nicely of course), undid all the clippings of the booster seat, took it out, shook it around to see if the keys were caught in some crevasse. Nothing. Of course nothing! Why would I expect anything more than nothing?

I was done with that. I raced inside, grabbed the second seat of car keys, and having placed her not so daintily back into her booster seat (having done up all the straps again), I raced her off to school late as usual.

Anyway, that was it. I never did find the car keys. So I kept using the second set of keys. I just assumed the first set was long gone. And so, over the next couple of months I forgot about it. The second set stayed safely found, school day after school day.

Then one day. One school day…

One school day several months later, we were late again. Usual routine. Launder, rinse, repeat.  Crammed her in, closed the car door, and discovered that I didn’t have the car keys.

The second set of car keys. Fear clutched my heart.  Nooo!  Not again!  And there was no third set. I mean, why would I waste the money and time and effort paying for an emergency set of keys? It’s not like I was careless with those keys or anything.

The usual routine of cramming her into the car led to the increasingly usual routine of grabbing her – and everything associated with her – out of the car. Then scrabbling frantically through everything I’d put into the car.

But all to no avail. The second set was gone too.  And this time I was furious!  Argghhh!  I could hear myself yelling.  “I can’t find the keys – AGAIN!”

And then Sophie – with those big brown eyes – and a concern look on her face that had grown as my groanings had – uttered that fateful sentence that has pretty much summed up her attitude life in the time that I known here (which is from day one until now – so some 24 and a bit years).

Pray Dad! Pray!

I paused. I stopped doing everything actually. I stood still. I bent over to her little, frightened face. My réponse went something a like this.  I took a deep breath, smiled at her as only a dad can do and uttered these words:  “That’s so sweet honey, that’s just so sweet. BUT FIRST I’M GOING TO SWEAR!”

Not sure I did swear – okay I likely didn’t, at least not out loud. But even as I started to rant before that little girl standing in front of me, surrounded by the detritus of her impending school day, scattered across the front lawn, I paused, sighed and  decided that maybe I should pray after all. That we should pray after all.

But did I really believe it would change anything? Maybe this was a good lesson for Sophie growing up that car keys – never mind car park spaces – don’t just turn up on a wing and prayer. And not even on a prayer!

I mean what did God care about me finding a lost set of car keys? Or more to the point, what did I care about God caring about me finding a lost set of car keys? At that point my world was perfectly, precisely and perfunctorily immanent.

And I did the one thing I did not want to do. I did not want to waste valuable searching time in order to pray. But I paused, held her little hand, and prayed:

“Dear Lord, you know where the keys are and we cannot find them. Please help us to find the keys so that Sophie can get to school in time. or at least three minutes late only.” (I mighta just made up that last bit for dramatic and literary effect).

When we had finished I felt calm. Or at least calmer. I took out her booster seat. Gently this time.  Turned it upside down as I had done the last time (only more gingerly) and a set of keys fell out onto the grass. Not just a set a keys, but the first set of keys. The ones I had lost months previously!

I was elated! It was lost coin, lost sheep and lost son all at once!  I danced around the lawn (or so I am telling you!). Rejoice oh neighbours (who were probably peeping through the net curtains already at the mad man on the lawn across the road) with me! I’ve found the keys!  The first set of keys people, the first set!!

Now I didn’t have a fattened calf handy, but I looked over at our lazy, slightly overweight lap dog, and to my mind he gave a nervous glance from his vantage point on the front porch.

We headed off to school, and we made it with negative three minutes to spare. And I drove back home alone from school quietly, thoughtfully and – yes – prayerfully, having left off a daughter who had just assumed that the invisible God who has broken into visible time and space in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus, hears and answers prayers.

And she had said bye-bye for the day to a Dad who had – and continues to – struggle with the idea that our big God is a big God of small things.

You see, in my self importance and intellectual pride, I so easily reduce God to a small god of big things rather than a big God of small things. Why? Because that’s the way things are in the modern immanently-framed world into which we are hermetically sealed like a snow-globe from which all of the magic of snow has disappeared.

The small God of Big things was my schtick as a fairly self-sufficient modern Christian pastor who had sermons to preach, and podcasts to deliver. God was big ideas. God was grand concepts. God was eternal significances. Which are all true of God. But he is also the big God of small things. And Sophie, in her childlike faith, knew it, got it, lived it, breathed it.

And still does.  Since that time, every time I feel dried out, immanently-framed, cynically motivated, or cruel in my desires and intentions, I hear a voice in my head “Pray, Dad, pray!“, and it’s a reminder of these words in Romans 8:

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

All things. Al things great and small. Even a lost set of car keys.

Oh, and the second set? Found them inside on the kitchen table when I got back home from dropping her off. Turns out I’d gone back in and put them there when getting something else and forgotten to pick them up again.