Lost Purse and a Useless Organ: Possible Trials of Faith?

A couple of days ago my wife’s purse was stolen. She left it in a fast food restaurant for ten minutes and when we came back, it was gone! Yeah- right here in Utah County- I was surprised too! Along with it were some important documents and ID’s, our canon camera, my iPod video and a nice cell phone. Probably a little over a thousand dollars worth of stuff.

Ever since my wife and I went inactive in the church, things have been going pretty well for us “blessings”-wise. But we have been kind of leery of the day that anything would go bad for us because our two TBM families would probably jump at any opportunity to point out any lack of blessings (my mom actually told me last fall that I would “surely pass through some difficulties and hardships as a result of not following the Gospel”). I knew from then on out that they would be watching us like a hawk for any visible failings.

So on Saturday someone stole my wife’s purse. Like i said, it had a lot of valuable stuff in it. Naturally, my wife told her mom, and naturally her mom gave my wife a lesson on paying tithing and how we would be more blessed if we were following the gospel. Then, she continued, “these things probably wouldn’t be happening to you if you were strong in the faith”. Now this is very funny because for the past year or more of inactivity and apostasy, we’ve had more positive “blessings” in our life than we’ve had in a long time, financially. For example, I just had a surgery a month ago where the doctor’s removed a nice little organ which was great for my plant-eating ancestors, but worthless for modern man. Yeah, that little remnant of evolution called the apendix. If you ask my dad, he’ll tell you “we just don’t know what it’s there for but one day we’ll find out, since it was made by God”. If you ask me, I’ll tell you it’s just a vestigial organ, or worse yet, nothing more than a potential time bomb in all of us- doing nothing other than potential harm or death. So anyways, after that surgery, I told the doctors to bill me directly because the insurance from my last job had just run out a month ago. Yeah, bad timing (or you could say it was God’s doing) to get stuck with a bill for $12k. What horribly bad timing to have a surgery the month you don’t have insurance. I was sure everyone would pounce on this one (i know i would have back when i had the mormon mentality).

but… Good news! Naw, screw that.. AWESOME NEWS!!! …when I called my insurance company a week after the surgery to see if they could do anything at all to help, they said that i was actually still covered for a month longer than I had expected! I had no idea. We were blessed in the area of oh, say around $11-12,000 (CHA-CHING!). Yeah, then I found out we were able to get a hefty sum back from my school tuition via the same job (cha-ching!). And then tax returns this year were extra bless-ed. The funny thing is, each time one of these things happened this year, if we had just paid our tithing prior to the event, we would have given credit to tithing. that would have been tripping my mind ’till today, seriously. Come to think of it, i now see “the blessings of tithing” likened to when someone has a backache, seeks alternative medicine or some New-Age help, gets better (regression fallacy) and then gives credit to the woo-woo treatment.

Anyways, I’m so sidetracked now. The main reason I wanted to write about this today is that my mother-in-law just told my wife how we needed to be going to church and then these things wouldn’t be happening since she got her purse stolen. I hate that!

[UPDATE!!] As I was writing this, I had just re-purchased my wife’s $200.00 phone on eBay and then the mall called us and said they found her purse! I quickly canceled my order of the phone too because whoever stole the purse left her phone in there! Yeah, count my lucky stars, huh! It’s kind of funny because i actually asked the thieves if they would be kind enough to leave the phone for us (since they wouldn’t even be able to use it anyways!) They also left all of her id’s, important documents, and credit cards (they kept the iPod and camera). Oh well, the story turned out a lot better than i was counting on! Lucky us.

~ by Anubys on May 21, 2007.