Lost and Found (2)

As it has been so wet, we still haven’t found a suitable dog walking area which isn’t waterlogged. There is also the added complication of many, many stray dogs wandering constantly from place to place. Bearing this in mind we woke up Sunday morning to wonderful sunshine and decided to pop in the car off down to our nearest beach to give Benji a really good run with his ball. (He loves the beach, but you can only really take him there first thing in the morning or late afternoon as most beaches in the Algarve don’t allow dogs.)

It was already 17c at 8.30 in the morning, so I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. As the wind blows in off the Atlantic I put a gillet jacket on over my t-shirt and off we went.

It was glorious. The tide was right out and it was the first time we’d seen so much of the beach. Benji had a fantastic time. On the way back we though we’d buy a couple of Danish pastries to have for breakfast before going back to church in Luz.

Peter disappeared off to the shop leaving me to open up the caravan and clean off the dog!........problem………I had put my keys and mobile phone in the shallow pockets of my gillet……..they were no longer there! I hurried off to meet Peter to grab the car keys from him to search the car……..they weren’t there either!

I don’t think Peter believed that I’d taken them with me, as he wanted to search the caravan, but I was insistent we get straight back down to the beach to look for them. We left Benji behind this time and went as fast as we could. Why is it when you want to get somewhere in a hurry all the traffic lights are against you?

I began to pray with vigour as thoughts passed through my mind of the inconvenience of only having one set of caravan keys.

As we came down the hill into Luz bay we could see the sea had come in quite a bit since we left 15mins earlier.

My prayers became a lot more urgent!

Having parked the car in exactly the same place we ran the route we’d walked back to the car with Benji.

Now Luz bay is made up of some lovely fine golden sand, but at the end of the beach we had gone to there were also a lot of rocks and pebbles before the sand starts. I began to look near to the rocks/pebbles while Peter went straight out to where the tide was advancing at a rate of knots now!

Within seconds the most wonderful Portuguese lady approached me and asked if I was looking for the bunch of keys she had in her hand. Wow, what an answer to the prayers I had said.

I couldn’t believe it. She had found them soon after we had left the beach the first time and had spent the 15/20 minutes or so wondering up and down the bay looking for the owner of them. She was as pleased to reunite me with them as I was to receive them. She hadn’t found the mobile with them though.

To my mind losing a mobile was a lot less inconvenient than losing the keys. Peter and I continued to search for it, but the tide was nearly right up to the rocks by this time. Peter had his mobile and decided to go back to the car for another look. This time he tried to ring it. It didn’t ring in the car, but a lady and gentleman just a little way away from him answered it and said they had rescued it on the beach just before a wave had got to it.

My, did we feel looked after!

I must admit I did pray with much more fervour to find the keys and the mobile, than I did when I lost Peter in Lagos!!

We thought it might be fun to write up about these two incidents, but as I’ve read them through I can’t finish without saying just how close we have found God in all we’re experiencing. We have lost count of the times we feel He has seen us through what could have been ‘not such good experiences’.