Because Ye Ask Amiss

In the fall of 1949, I was a student at Ohio Northern University. After two years of marriage and a year as Christians, my wife and I decided it was important for me to pursue a college education. The trip from Indian Lake, where we lived, to the university, was about thirty miles. The time in the car back and forth became an important time for reviewing my studies and for prayer.
Along with the other freshmen, I was required to take physical education. Each of us had a locker with a combination lock where street clothes and valuables were stored during class. Perhaps because it was a church college, I never thought to be concerned about theft. That is, until the day I returned to my locker to find my watch was missing from the top shelf, where I always left it. It made me angry and disappointed. I had earned the money for that watch by delivering papers.  It was the first good watch I had ever owned.  My wife and I had no extra money to spend on a new one. All our savings had been used to pay the semester’s tuition.
I reported the theft and found that others had lost valuables as well. They were sure someone knew the combinations for some of the locks. It ruined my day, and as I drove home that afternoon, I prayed to get my watch back. I told the Lord how much I needed that watch and reminded Him we couldn’t afford a new one.
As a young Christian with only a little knowledge of Scripture, I hadn’t yet learned that one of the responsibilities of the Holy Spirit is to “Bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have told you.” I knew the Holy Spirit was faithful that day because as I neared home, still praying for the Lord to find a way to get my watch back, a verse I had memorized interrupted the prayer. It was: “Ye have not because ye ask amiss that ye might consume it on your own lusts.”
I felt chastised for my selfishness, for being more concerned about the loss of my watch than I was about the soul of the person who had stolen it.  I asked the Lord to forgive me, and to help the one who had stolen the watch to realize what he was doing before it was too late and he was in serious trouble. I began to feel better; when I arrived home to tell my wife the news, it didn’t seem as bad as it had originally.
I adjusted to life without the watch. Just to be safe, I started leaving home a little earlier. Soon, the incident was forgotten and I was caught up in the hectic balancing of life at home with life at school.
It was perhaps a month later when, upon returning to my locker after class, I found the watch again. It sat, much to my astonishment, on the top shelf, as if it had never been gone.  It was clean, shiny and ticking away the correct time.
The watch wore out some time ago. However, I keep that old watch to this day, more than sixty years later, because, though it outlived its usefulness, the lesson never has. Every time I open the box it shares with things of greater monetary worth, I remember the pricelessness of that moment when I learned for the first time what God’s word means when it says, “Ye have not because ye ask amiss.