Getting Lost

The lost sheep and the lost coin in Luke 15: these are old news stories for a born-and-raised-Baptist girl like me. I've read them a few hundred times . . . heard them a few hundred times . . . probably even taught them -- well, less than a hundred times, but still a lot. Old news.

Except that scripture is alive and active and sharp as the dickens, slicing you open right to where reparative surgery needs to be done in your spirit and heart and mind.

I think it was in Sunday School a while back that these stories came up again. And as he is wont to do, God pointed out to me (probably through Jeni or Ray, our teachers, because that’s usually how he does things) something I hadn’t really noticed before.

I’ve always read these stories as God seeking out the lost – that is, those who don’t know him yet. Unbelievers. God willing to go to extremes to find them and make them his. Bring that sheep into the fold. Add that coin to the precious stash.

Except here’s the thing: that sheep that got lost? He was already part of the fold. That coin was already an integral and valued member of the stash. These lost things belonged to their owners from the beginning. They weren’t being welcomed into a new home; they were being brought back to an old home they’d wandered from.

Ohhhh . . . that’s different.

And that’s important. Because I need to know that I can belong to God and still get lost – not lost in the sense that I’m losing my salvation, but lost in the sense that I am not where I’m supposed to be, not where God wants me at this particular time in his perfect plan. We all are prone to wandering off on our own, yes?

Of course, I can’t speak for any of the rest of you, but I know where I get lost: my mind.

I’m an imaginative woman; this probably comes naturally to me to a degree but was exacerbated by my being the only child in my home growing up and having nobody to play with a lot of the time. I learned to imagine playmates and imagine scenarios we were playing in. This is the habitual condition of my mind – I am all too often mentally living somewhere that is not in the present moment.

Sometimes it’s moments of my past that I want to relish again, or moments I wish I could get a redo on, or moments I need to sit in and process and learn from.

And sometimes it’s just plain old fantasies of a different life, a different world, a different me. I’ve certainly had days when I arrogantly believed that my ideas for humanity (and my life in particular) were better than God’s.

But most often, it’s potential moments in my future: conversations I want to have and therefore plan out meticulously in my head . . . confrontations I fear are coming and therefore plot strategies for . . . events that have very little chance of actually occurring but that I feel a need to think through and be prepared for, just in case . . .

Corrie ten Boom famously said, “Worry is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength – carrying two days at once.” She was kind of paraphrasing Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Each day has enough worry of its own.” I never characterize what I’m doing as worry, but it’s a close relative, I suppose – and it’s probably just as useless.

Several years ago, “mindfulness” was a popular buzzword out there that I started to find annoying. But God has been convicting me lately of the need for being mindful, being fully present in the here and now. (Actually, he’s been after me about this for quite a while; check out this post from almost two years ago, for crying out loud. Sigh . . . some lessons get good and learnt; some we have to repeat over and over.)

I really am trying, folks. Trying NOT to get lost so often. Here and now is a good place. I need to stop giving my Shepherd cause to keep chasing down his silly little wandering sheep.