A Tale of Two Losses

My mother went through a very difficult experience recently when her wallet was stolen. She may have left it somewhere or dropped it but the person who found it did not attempt to return it as I think any of us would!

Instead he took her cash and used her credit cards. She suspects it was a man who took it because suddenly she had charges for car parts and BBQ accessories. An assumption, but a plausible one. She wondered how the store clerks weren’t even blinking at a man using a credit card with a woman’s name on it. But then again, my husband uses my credit card frequently with no problem.

There’s no excuse for this and no justification. This person who used my mother’s credit cards knows that it was wrong.

At first I think about how times are tough these days and people are struggling, but then I’m reminded of the time a friend’s brother went to India and accidentally left his iPad in a taxi when he went to a huge festival. He was already well into the crowd before he realized that it was missing and he had to just accept that he was never going to see it again. Yet when he was leaving the festival hours later, among the throngs of people, many of them non-Indian visitors like himself, his taxi driver found him. The driver brought the man to his house to return his iPad.

Two different stories of losing something valuable and two very different outcomes.

I think what the one that happened in America is an example of what happens when we forget that we are partners on this journey in life. If that man had seen my mother as his mother or his sister, he would never have stolen from her. I think that’s the attitude we all need to have.