Have you ever lost something and can’t find it? If anyone asks you, all you can say is that “I’ve looked everywhere!” — when clearly you haven’t! It’s obvious because you haven’t found it yet!

Where did it go? It was just here? How did it disappear? Very disturbing! There are some things I really don’t care about losing but I still want to know where they went!

When you’re a child, it’s even worse!

WHERE IS IT? they scream. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?

You don’t know, you say.

IT MUST BE SOMEWHERE!

You’re right!

WELL, IT DIDN’T JUST WALK OFF, NOW DID IT!

But it did!

IT JUST WALKED OFF?

You start crying. Yes, it walked off!

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT JUST WALKED OFF?

I lost the cat!

I think there’s a huge great big pile of stuff where all lost things go. An enormous constantly changing pile that you don’t know about and that’s why you can’t find your stuff! And that pile is located in Heaven. That’s where things go. It’s one of the purposes of Heaven. When you get there, the first thing they do is give you back all the stuff you lost.

Oh, here’s Steve. Lemme see what we got for you. 105 pairs of sunglasses, 4019 ball point pens, nineteen teddy bears, your wet baseball jacket, one tennis shoe with a hole in it, two helmets, five sets of keys and 149 pieces of paper with phone numbers on it! There’s good news and bad news, too. You get back all your lost wallets but no money inside. Just like it is on earth! They keep the money for all the tithes you didn’t pay.

If you keep looking hard enough on earth, sometimes God will give it back. “Well, he’s looked very hard and so I think I’ll help him out this time!” And, whoosh, it’s back! But in the meantime, God drives you a little crazy. You keep looking in the same place over and over because it ought to be there. You check your pockets 12 times for your keys. You go into the garage and look in a drawer — okay, the keys aren’t back yet! And then you get desperate. You check the freezer and the ashes in the fireplace. Just so when somebody asks, you can say you looked everywhere!

You know else might be in Heaven? As a kid, I believed there was a special Balloon Room in Heaven. All the kids, all over the world, who lost their balloons are safely stored in Heaven. God took them as they floated upwards into His hands. And right off the Main Hall of Heaven, you’ll find the Balloon Room, where they’re all gathered together — reds, blues, oranges, whites, yellows, greens and all kinds of colors. So, if I lost my balloon, I wasn’t too worried. God would collect it and put it with its friends, all in one place. And one day, when I get there, I’ll find all my balloons.

But I gotta get there first, right?