An important business check blew right out the window! Was it lost for good?

At the fancy Gap, Virginia, mountain resort where I sold property, my manager asked me to run an urgent errand. "A couple from Charlotte bought one of our lots," he told me. "The husband just called. He wrote a cheque on the wrong account.

Could you take the cheque to him and exchange it for a new one?" He gave me directions and the cheque, which I tucked under the visor inside my car. Air-conditioning bothers my sinuses, so I rolled down the window. Traffic, though heavy, moved at a good clip.

I was going through Charlotte, not far from my house, when disaster struck. The wind blew the cheque from the visor. It flew right out the window. I pulled over. Papers in yards and bushes and the road, but no cheque. If I don’t find it, the whole deal could fall apart.

I drove home to get my wife and mother-in-law to help me look. I took them to the scene. We split up and searched both sides of the road, a couple of blocks in both directions. Nothing. And dusk was coming on.

"I’ll never be able to get a new cheque without turning over the old one," I said. "How will I explain this to my manager?" We went back to the car. After driving about three blocks I had a strange sense that I should let up on the gas pedal. The car slowed.

My eyes were drawn to the left, where a church sat atop a big grassy hill. I turned into the driveway. "What are you doing?" my wife asked. "The cheque couldn’t have flown all the way up here." I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I just knew I had to get up to that church.

I parked, got out of the car and felt myself drawn to the lawn. Lying on the grass about 40 feet away was a rectangular piece of paper. I ran over and picked it up. The cheque! Carefully, I folded it and put it into my pocket. As I headed back to the car, I glanced at the sign in front of the church.

I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or fall to my knees in grateful prayer. Underneath the church’s name and the pastor’s name was a Bible verse: "Seek and ye shall find."