"i'm missing one"

About two years ago I was volunteering with a church in Eugene. I worked with the babies up to four years of age. We had about five to eight children regularly in our class & we would teach them typical lessons about sharing & God's love. Most of the weeks we would have a coloring page they could work on that had something to do with the week's lesson. One week this little two & a half year old boy named Adam kept glancing around at his crayons with a bewildered look on his face.

I asked him, "Adam is everything okay?"

He answered me, "I'm missing one!"

I looked down at what must have been a pile of at least thirty various colored crayons in front of him & chuckled to myself...how would he know if he was missing one? It was a really cute interaction.

Later I got to thinking about how this compares to the story of the lost sheep in the Bible. The Shepherd left his flock of ninety-nine sheep to search for the one missing sheep. Because that one sheep was important to Him.

In the same way...God looks around & says "I'm missing one" (or a lot more than one) & that missing person is important to God. If that missing person is important to God...they should be important to us as well.

I'd like to think that that missing person was important to me...but a lot of times I think I get so caught up in my own reality that I don't notice the areas that God has called me to minister to on a daily basis. I pray that I will continually become more & more sensitive to His direction as He shows me, "hey Shelly, I'm missing one."