What have bank cards to do with faith? Since starting this blog, I’ve had a lot of mishaps with bank cards. Even though I didn’t really intend this blog to be about bank cards, I felt a need to vent my feelings by writing about these muddles. I thought that the unfortunate series of incidents with bank cards had come to an end in the spring. However, I made another careless mistake recently, and this time I was not quite so sanguine about it. I began to wonder if bank cards and faith are not quite such wholly unrelated subjects after all.

The muddle started off simply enough. I relaxed. I was on holiday abroad, and I sat in a busy cafe and ate ice cream with my family and didn’t think too much about the purse I had shoved deep into the rucksack beneath the swimming stuff and the sun lotion. We went for a swim in a lake, and hiked back along a quiet mountain path as shadows lengthened in the soft evening light. We didn’t quite reach our holiday house, before the children began to flag, and we stopped to rummage through the rucksack for the emergency food rations. By the time we got back, the hillside was in shadow and we cooked a quick meal and bundle the kids into bed. My husband unpacked the rucksack afterwards. I knew that I should really have checked where my purse was and put it back into my handbag, but I was far tired and it didn’t seem to matter. I was hardly going to need it that night.

The next morning, I was just about to hunt for my purse so that I could go out and buy milk when I suddenly fell victim to the holiday tummy. The least said about the next few hours the better, but I can report that I was not in any condition to worry about where my purse was, never mind try to locate it. I wasn’t quite sure where this evil bug had come from. A few days later, when we were out and about, I caught one of my children filling the water bottles from the bowl of the fountain where people spit and pee and let their dogs bathe, rather than from the stream of running water. All was then clear.

To give me a bit of peace and quiet, my husband took the kids out for a longer hike. I recovered remarkably quickly and decided to hike up the mountain to meet them. Before I left, I hunted unsuccessfully for my purse, but expected that it was probably still in the hiking rucksack, which my husband had taken with him. Mild anxiety turned very quickly into total panic, when I met up with the rest of the family and found out that my purse wasn’t in the rucksack.

I walked back to the holiday house to check again. Although I was walking through some of the most stunning scenery in Europe, I was utterly miserable, because I was coming to the following conclusions:

– My purse must have either been stolen the previous day in the cafe or been lost on the way back to the holiday house.
– In either case, I was very unlikely to ever see it again.
– Because it had taken me almost twenty-four hours to realise this, someone had probably used my bank card and my driving license to take a large sum of money out of our bank account.

I tried to pray, but my faith felt like a threadbare rag which no longer covered me. I was assaulted by feelings that I was a bad, good-for-nothing person whom God couldn’t possibly love, and that God had just been waiting for me to relax and let my guard down, in order to punish me.

A thorough search of the holiday house, including under beds and in drawers and kitchen cupboards, revealed no sign of the missing purse. I phoned my bank to cancel my card, and just before the credit on my phone ran out, I heard the assistant gabble something about all cards held in this name will be cancelled. Now I had another thing to worry about. It was a joint account. Did that mean that the bank would automatically cancel my husband’s card too?

Because half of our holiday money had been in my purse, we didn’t have enough money left to pay for train fares to the airport. While my husband went out to try and make another withdrawal from the cash machine, I went through the following worst case scenario:

– We won’t be able to get any more money out because
a) a thief has already emptied the account, or
b) the bank has also cancelled my husband’s card
– We won’t have enough money for food and so we will have to starve ourselves so that the children can eat.
– We won’t have enough money for trains to the airport. I couldn’t think of a way around this one.

My husband returned with some money, and none of these fears were realised, but it was still a pretty grim evening.

The morning sun, brought a little more hope and optimism, even though my schedule for the morning was going to be a long, hot hike to the tourist office on the off-chance that someone had handed in a lost purse, with possibly a detour via the police station, to officially report a missing purse.

Just before I set out, my husband said that he would make one last search of the house. I didn’t have any hopes that this would yield anything. However, he shook out the covers and checked the bed. There it was, wedged between the bed and the wall. I had checked under the bed the day before and had totally missed it. All night, I had been worrying about the missing purse, while I was lying right beside it.

I am utterly convinced that God must have a sense of humour.

I am still not sure quite how or why this mix-up happened, but it showed me that when push comes to shove, I still have a shockingly bad image of God as a petty tyrant who is waiting to pounce if I let down my defences for a moment and actually enjoy myself. There’s no point blaming it on my Calvinist upbringing. It’s my problem now, and I have to deal with it. The incident also showed me how vulnerable I feel and how little faith I have when the security of my bank card and access to money is (apparently) taken away.

I think I need to revisit ’30 Lies About Money’ by Peter Koenig, an unusual book which begins by stating quite frankly that it is about the relationship between money and soul.