-Confirmed it was the money that went missing in 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/us/joel-osteen-cash-found-plumber.html
-the 2014 incident was reported on a monday morning at 8:30am, after "an employee of Lakewood Church and an off duty Harris County Sheriff's Officer working security
noticed the break in." Police subsequently placed the time of the incident as having happened at any time between 2:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon and 8:30am Monday morning, when it was reported.
-the church suffered no financial loss, as the donations were fully insured
-the amount- 200k in cash and 400k in checks- is a drop in the bucket for the church. It represented only a single weekend's church service donations.
OK, so what would be a scenario that could explain what happened.. ?
Here's one:
A church employee, maybe an unthanked and unappreciated cleaner, works next to that overstuffed light-security safe every week. It begins weighing on him.. After many weeks of temptation, he finds himself once again presented with an opportunity where he has enough "alone time" to make everything work in his favor.. He needs the money.. he knows the church won't suffer- everything is insured.. ... He caves. But after getting it open and sweeping the contents into a clean office garbage bag, he gets spooked by an interruption (ie, maybe hearing the security officer walking in from a far hallway). Now he's in real trouble. Knowing he's about to be caught red-handed, he has to immediately find some way to dump the goods, or be discovered as a thief. In those type of buildings, the upper walls are often left unfinished (ie, above the easily slid-away ceiling tiles, the wall becomes simply two rows of cinder blocks, with open space between them). Maybe he got on the counter, pushed up a ceiling tile, and hefted everything up inside, maybe even thinking he could get it later. Now, the sack was too heavy to just put on top of another ceiling tile- they can't hold weight- so he hefts it on "top" of the cinderblock wall instead. He puts the tile back in place and gets back on the floor just as the security officer walks in, and tells him he just found the safe broken open this way.
Unfortunately for the thief, there was no finished top to the wall- meaning his booty sack spilled into the empty void between both sides, and the envelopes all fell down- all the way down to the lower floor- hopelessly out of reach to him. And there they remained, sealed inside the brick wall, until the plumber found them so many years later.
In fact, it wouldn't have had to have been a church employee- any kid from the youth group who was into "urban exploring" could easily have gotten himself into that same mess. Uhm, ya... don't ask me how I know.
