a lil' incident

Dear All,

I want to thank all of your for praying for me. I believe it is your prayers that have carried me through and delivered me from this trying incident.

I arrived at the San Francisco International Airport at noon on Friday. Hoping to save around $20, I took the underground system, instead of the door-to-door van as my mother instructed me to. I reached the dowtown Berkeley underground station and then hopped on to a bus, lugging two heavy luggage bags while carrying my laptop backpack in one hand. I reached my dorm unit within minutes and was rather excited to see it again. I hopped off the bus and took the elevator up to my room. However, once I got to my room I realized that I had carried down from the bus only my two luggage bags, but not my notebook backpack.

I was rather alarmed, because my notebook backpack contained not only my notebook but also my passport and various important immigration documents. I rushed down to the bus station but the bus was nowhere in sight. Hurriedly, I called the bus company, but the operator refused to contact the bus drivers for me. The people at the bus company would not even help me determine the exact bus I had been riding on. In desperation, I began taking random rides on buses serving the line I had taken, and began looking for signs of my backpack. None of the bus drivers on any of those buses had seen it either. I remember saying to my friend, Grace, as dusk approached, "I hope this isn't one of those times where no matter what I do, I can't help the situation at all."

The next morning, after consulting with my parents, I made a police report. After taking down my narration of the events, the police officer called the bus company and found out the number of the bus I had been riding on, and also determined that the bus would have stopped at the end of its route about 20 minutes after I had been dropped off. From there, the bus would have been cleaned and inspected by the driver, before setting back on its route again. This meant that every bus on that line would have been checked several times after the time I had lost my backpack. However, none of the drivers had reported anything that day. I knew that the situation was definitely out of my hands now. It was one of "those times".

Someone had taken my bag, and there was no way I could influence him/her now to choose to hand it over to Lost&Found, rather than keeping it and its contents to himself/herself. But God could. So I prayed fervently and frequently. I had Grace pray for me and I had my cell group leader pray as well. And I had all of you. I had lost the bag on Friday. The Lost&Found office was closed on the weekend, as well as Monday which was Martin Luther King Jr. day here in America. It was only on Tuesday - today - that the offices would be open and I would know if any kind soul had sent my backpack to Lost&Found. I remember sitting upright in my bed at 6: 30a.m., just praying while my two roommates were still sound asleep. At 9:45a.m., in a break between my classes, I phoned the lost and found office and heard "Calvin Teng? yeah, we got your stuff."

And here I am, typing this email on my MacBook, after my cell group leader drove me to the Lost&Found office in Oakland. God did what I definitely could not have done. All praises be to him!

Calvin Teng