What's in Your Wallet?

Tuesday morning, the Middle School teachers started the day –like every week day- by meeting for staff Bible reading, meditation, and prayer at 7:25 a.m. When it came time for prayer requests, Wade shared that when he left his apartment that morning to jog to school he had his keys, phone and wallet. When he arrived at school, he had his phone and keys. No wallet.

We all moaned knowingly. Wade had already called his wife to see if by chance it had fallen out in their flat. In the midst of his tale of woe, his phone rang. It was his wife calling to say there was no sign of the wallet in the apartment.

As soon as morning devotions were done, Wade was going to start the nightmarish process of notifying the authorities, cancelling his credit cards, applying for a new i.d. card . . . you know the drill.

Then at the end of first period, the following email was waiting for us in our inboxes:

At 8:45am, as I was starting science class, I received a call that the Shatin police had received my wallet. I will be going over to pick up my wallet, intact, at lunch time. In under two hours it got to the police station. It was a good mini-lesson on prayer for my first period class. Isn't Hong Kong great!

It’s not an isolated story. My principal has lost his wallet twice in the ten years he has lived here. Both times it was returned to him with all his cash in it.

Last week in the letters-to-the-editor section of the Hong Kong newspaper an overseas traveler wrote to thank the unknown taxi driver who made sure that he got the wallet back that he had left in the backseat.

I think that I am going to make up a decoy wallet with an expired drivers license, an old library card, and a used mass transit card. I am going to strategically “lose” it at various times and locations around Hong Kong and then gage how long it takes for it to work its way back to me. It will be my own little sociological test.

In fact, maybe I’ll try it in various cities around the world –Paris, Rome, Madrid- and then rank them on their wallet-returnedness.

Jack

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got his wallet back with everything in it except the cash. Argh.

If and when I find a wallet, not only am I going to return it with all the cash in it, but I’m going to actually double the amount of money in it. Won't the owner be happily suprised when he gets his wallets comes back with more cash in it than when he lost it.

Wouldn’t that be a nice trend if it caught on?