They're Watching Us!

I had a sort of interesting thing happen yesterday, which began about two weeks ago when I took the kids to a see Bolt at the bioscoop (movie theatre) in our little town of Alkmaar. We had paid for our tickets, and after making sure everyone had gone potty, we were going to wait in line (or, rather, "herd" gathered outside the entrance - I think I mentioned before that they don't really do "lines" here) when I noticed a 5 euro note on the ground. There were a few people standing around it, but they were faced the opposite direction, and nobody seemed to notice it. I picked it up, and Kaylie said to me, "We should keep it."

Now, she has never found anything bigger than a 5 cent piece on the street, and of course you don't normally try hunting down the owner of a nickel, so she didn't realize that this was a moral dilemma and not just pocket change.

I briefly asked around to see if anyone had dropped it, and, after getting no response from those closest to it, I handed it to the cashier. First, she tried to give me change for it, but then I explained that I had found it and just wanted to turn it in. She smiled, a little confused apparently, said "thank you," and went back to work selling tickets. And as the kids and I went and joined the herd, I talked to them about why we needed to turn the money in rather than keep it, and we continued with our day enjoying our first movie completely in Dutch.

I hadn't thought about that incident at all since then, but yesterday, something strange happened. I was at The Mall, which is the afterschool program I have been volunteering with, and a teenage boy I had never seen walked in and was talking to one of the other leaders not too far from me. I heard my name mentioned, and I asked what they were talking about.

The boy then explained to me that he had seen me at the bioscoop and seen, or somehow knew (the conversation was in Dutch, so I didn't quite get it all), that I had turned in the 5 euros, and it had been his money!

I couldn't believe that here, in a different town, about 40 minutes away by bike, I ran into the one person who owned the money, and he recognized me. When you do things like turn in money or objects that you find, you don't expect to be recognized for what you did, at least not by the person who lost it, and it was a great feeling. Even better, I was able to tell Kaylie about the incident and watch her face light up.

This small event made me remember that the little things we do are being watched, and, because we are Christians, those things can either be a good reflection of Christ or they can harm peoples' views of Him.