As we were leaving that afternoon (I had a party, otherwise I would have stayed to watch all night) we were wandering around the parking lot trying to find our car (a daily occurrence - I lose my car all the time) and Emma shouts, "Mom, money!" She was a few steps behind me and I was all, "mmm-hmmm", thinking that a penny or quarter was not worth the effort to retrieve it. But I turned and spied a WAD of bills lying under an exhibitor's truck. I picked it up and counted - $300. Cash! Not traceable! But how to find the owner? Can't just walk up to random people and show them the money and ask if it's theirs. My mind was racing trying to find out what to do with it. The strangest thing was this: in the past I would have immediately had churchy thoughts: I'll turn it in to lost and found and get a warm fuzzy feeling and a gold star in my passport book to the Celestial Kingdom. I'll get up on Sunday and bear my testimony about how righteous I felt! I'll go to heaven and Heavenly Father will be so proud of me! All the other people at church will see what a righteous soul I am and they will want to be just like me!
I had not ONE of those thoughts. And I was vividly aware of it. It was a little shocking and so liberating! I no longer base my decisions on whether I'm going to get in trouble with some obtuse higher power. I'm not living every day under the watchful eye of some invisible being, paranoid that at any given time I'm going to make a decision that will land me in the purgatory slammer. I'm so free! I only base my decisions on logic (we'll not talk about me flipping people off in traffic or spitting my gum out the window, hoping it will hit the tailgater behind me) and some remaining sense of morality. I sometimes wonder whether I would have a sense of "right" or "wrong" if I hadn't been raised in the church that I was. Is a basic sense of morality something that all humans are born with or it is completely learned? Nature vs. nurture? Don't have any idea. I haven't been an official member of the LDS church for nearly three years (when I had my records removed) but I keep making these cool discoveries about the changes in me and I LOVE IT. It really is a journey. I wonder when I get to the end?
You want to know whether I kept it don't you? I didn't. The only thing that made me turn it in to the 90 year-old moldy Scottsdale lady running the Lost and Found office was the thought of how pissed off I would be if I had lost that much money. I would want someone to turn it in if it were me. I'm kind of a believer in Karma. And, yeah, I guess it was a good lesson in honesty for my eight year-old or some such bullshit.
Now give me my gold star dammit.
