Luke 15 : 1-10 tells us two stories about losing something, and then finding it again. A coin, and a sheep. Two things of moderate economic significance, two things that involved considerable effort to find once they were lost. But although they are often told this way, I would say that they are not the same story told two different ways, but two slightly different takes on the same idea.

Take the lost coin. There is no coin in our currency that would merit spending and entire day turning over every piece of paper in your room, going through your clothes and your pockets, turning out your bags and your suitcases, trying to find out where you had put it. But this coin was worth a day’s wages. How much is a day’s wages? – reports vary, depending upon whether you adjust for illness, or the difference in pay for men and women, and so on. You can google to find out what an average day’s wages might be worth where you live. For the sake of argument, let’s say £80.

So, imagine you had four twenty pound notes in an envelope. And then imagine you mislaid it. What would you do? I imagine that you would go RIGHT NOW to track it down. I think you would spend a fair bit of effort trying to find out where you’d left it. You would retrace your steps – go back and look on the last desk you worked on, go through all your pockets and your books and papers, trying to find this note. To put it in perspective, it wouldn’t be a matter of life and death if you didn’t find it. It wouldn’t ruin your life if you lost eighty pounds. But it would ruin your day.

I like the story about a day’s wages. Quite a few stories in the New Testament liken knowing God to something of insurpassable worth – a perfect pearl, for instance. But it’s good to be reminded that it isn’t all about the ultimate and the extreme. Most of what we go through in our lives is not about the things that matter in ultimate terms: Most of it is about the everyday stuff. It’s about putting the food on the table, paying the bills, doing a day’s work, helping a neighbour with a small thing,remembering to call someone who needs to hear from us. Not one outstanding and precious jewel, but thousands of days when our actual concern is a day’s wages.

Lent is about everyday matters: about re-grounding ourselves in the knowledge of our humanity, and our dependence upon God. And it is about living each day, in this earthed place, in a thoroughly human way. Not as superheroes, nor subhuman. Just being properly human, one day at a time.