As I stepped out of my car this morning on the way to work, for some odd reason, I turned to check and make sure my headlights were on. I'm not sure why I did it. The previous day, I had turned them on because it was dark and rainy out, and almost forgot on my way to work. That day I also turned around and checked, saw that they were still on and turned them off.

(As a side explanation, my car was made in 1968. The headlights don't go off automatically.)

This morning it was sunny. I hadn't turned my headlights on. So, I don't know why I checked. I do know that I saw a glint on the pavement in front of my car. I stopped for half a second and took a closer look. It was a silver hoop earing. I shrugged it off and started walking towards the building. Then, I stopped again. I remembered Rabbi Friedman giving a drasha about the mitzvah of returning a lost object. According to the Torah, even if you're leading the troops into war, you're supposed to stop what your doing if you see a lost object. You're supposed to stop what you're doing, even if it's just someone's lost button in the middle of the street.

Could you imagine an army commander stopping a battalion, picking up a lost button and shouting, "ATTENTION! WHO LOST A BUTTON?!" The Torah's awfully clear on this one, and it seeped right into my conscience. I turned around, went back in front of my car (against my own negative inertia - it was freezing outside) and picked up the earing. All the time, I was thinking, "Why am I doing this? This looks like a cheap earing. Oh yeah. Mitzvah."

I clutched the earing tightly in my hand and made my way into the building. As usual, I greeted the people at the front desk, but this time I stopped and held out the earing.

"I found an earing in the parking lot. I thought I should go ahead and bring it here."

Suddenly one of the other young ladies at the friend desk turned to us and said,

"Keep it here. Someone came up here yesterday and said they lost an earing."

Wow. Every lost object belongs to someone. While HaShem may want us to drop everything and do what it takes to find the owner of that lost object, it became clear to me this morning that if you put out a little bit of effort, HaShem will take care of the rest. If it was this easy to fulfil the Mitzvah of returning a lost object, one can only imagine how much help we get from HaShem on other, seemingly difficult Mitzvos.