We were long overdue for a family vacation. Our kids chattered excitedly as we loaded bag after bag into the car, until, finally, we were ready to leave. I reached into my pocket for my phone to enter the address into the GPS, but came up empty.
“Where’s my phone?”
It wasn’t anywhere in the car, or the house. We even drove to school and checked there. It was nowhere to be found. We searched for close to two hours, to no avail.
“Hashem!” I cried out, in my mind. “I’m sure there’s a good reason for all this, but what is it? The kids are all ready, and they’re so excited! Why is this long delay necessary? Please show me!” I took a few deep, calming breaths, and reminded myself that Hashem does everything for a reason. A few minutes later, my wife called the phone for the umpteenth time. We hadn’t heard it ring in the house, the school, or the office. But finally, we heard its muffled tones in one of the bags in the car.
With the phone finally found, I was ready to hit the gas and try to make up for the lost time. Just before we flew out of the parking lot, my wife pointed and exclaimed, “Hey! Aren’t those two of your boys?”
I jumped out of the car and ran over to the two long-haired teens.
“Hey! What’s going on, guys?” I greeted them, heartily. “Did you put tefillin on yet today?”
“No, not yet.”
I wrapped the tefillin around their arms and we danced together. One of the boys committed to putting on tefillin every day, and was the major inspiration behind our “daily tefillin selfie” campaign.
Hashem kept us around for two hours, searching in vain for a phone that was two feet from us the entire time, so we could help these two neshamos and change their lives for the better.
*Names changed to protect privacy
