I am a thrift store junkie. There’s something about walking the aisles of a store, not knowing what you’ll find buried within its shelves, that just speaks to the inner treasure hunter in me.

Recently, I bought my most favorite treasure of all.

I wasn’t looking for it.

I don’t need it.

I’m pretty sure my husband thinks I’m crazy.

But as I walked toward the back of my local Salvation Army, I saw it there, staring into my soul.

A red and orange floral couch from the 70s.

As I walked up to it, I noticed how crisp and clean it looked and I began to get hopeful.

I lifted the cushions, searching for the obvious marks that must have forced its previous owner to rid himself of it. Around and around I looked, and still I found nothing. There were no marks to be found. It was as clean as when it left the showroom floor.

When I was a girl, I would treasure hunt in my grandparents’ basement and attic. I would root through the shelves of my grandpa’s National Geographic collection, hoping that I would get lucky and find a map embedded within their pages. I would rifle through his collection of books brought back from his time in Egypt during WWII, anticipating finding some key to unlock biblical mysteries.

I had a pretty wild imagination, but I imagined that even my grandfather, behind his stoic German face, held the same wild thoughts that I produced.

Now, looking at the couch, I knew I had to have it. The memories of sitting in my grandparents’ basement, wildly decorated in the 1970s, brought me right back to that time of uninhibited imagination.

It was a time when my mind went so wild that I often garnered strange looks from extended family. A time when my closet was a spaceship and a boulder in the woods was my cabin hideaway. A time when my faith required no bolstering or encouragement.

Jesus talks about having faith like a child. To children it is not just faith, but everything, that is possible. There’s no need to convince them of the existence of animals long extinct, they are already able to envision the long-lost animals that roamed the Earth long ago.

While I consider myself to be a faithful person, my faith was strongest when I was in the dark corner of an attic, hoping to find some link to Jesus.

So I bought the couch. I still don’t know where I’m going to put it. It will even most likely clash with my orange wall.

But I don’t care.

I’d do anything to be that little girl again. To have that faith again. If only just to sit on its cushions, feeling the upholstery, stirring my imagination, letting the impossible become possible again.