Searching for Hidden Treasure

[[Just a short, previously unpublished post from camp days- because it was a good reminder for me today. And maybe it will be so for you, too.]]
 
One of my favorite activities as a kid (which, I suppose, wasn't so long ago) was to dig through dumpster-like garbage sheds in our trailer court with my best friend. They were probably stinky and smelly and gross, full of dirt and grime and other unmentionable things.
But all we saw and all that I remember was the potential for hidden treasure.
Gift bags with leftover pennies on the bottom, an old medicine cabinet, a bag of flour half-full... Simple, ordinary things, but to the imaginary mind, GOLD.

{Yes, there is an object lesson here}

You see, now that I'm no longer a child, there are big-girl problems (or whatever the equivalent is). I lock the keys in the car, forget to wash the very filthy floor, become frustrated with people that I think just don't know how to communicate the right way, and miss deadlines by a day or more.  

The other day found us doing our weekly unloading of camp trash at the local dump. Noticing some random items sitting off to the side, we asked the man in charge if we could take it with us.
"One man's junk is another man's treasure"? Of course.
Even though the free items were simple and ordinary, I felt like a giddy 7-year old all over again. We had found treasure in junk.

{And here comes the object lesson...}
Sometimes living in a big-person world, I get distracted by the "junk" of life: my junk and other people's junk. Sometimes it's all I see, and it sure does stink. And the more it piles up, the more it stinks. It can seem like a never-ending mountain of stench and mess.

I want to reach a place where I am more earnestly looking for treasure than getting so distracted by the junk. To reach for the moments that I am reminded to look for beauty in the most unlikely places.
Jesus tells me to look beyond the "big people problems," and search for treasure, because there is a delight in the unexpected.
Imagine walking into a store full of beautiful, shimmering diamonds. There may be excitement at seeing such beauty, but not the kind of delight one would feel if they found a beautiful, perfect diamond in the middle of a trash pile.
It has to do with finding the unexpected in the ordinary, and finding that it is good.
It has to do with finding Jesus in the ordinary, and finding that He is good.

I want to be a 7 year-old prairie girl again.
Delighting in the little, unexpected things that come because there is treasure, and there is hope.