Guess Who Is Looking for You

My cousin Rick didn’t mean to get lost.  He didn’t mean to end the day scared and hungry or with his parents and the community in a panic.  He just walked off one day, going out for an adventure, going out for an adventure for which he was not dressed properly.  He wore his diaper. 

Among family and community, there was a sense of panic.  The search was on.  Fields and roads were being walked.  The local crop duster took to the air, flying over the fields, looking for some sign of the missing boy.  It was near evening when word came that Rick had been found, found but not yet rescued.

Rick had not, as it was thought, walked off alone.  He had been accompanied by the family’s two dogs.  When the would-be rescuer found my cousin, he could not get near him.  The dogs didn’t know the rescuer, and Rick was too young to know or to tell them that the rescuer was a good man.  The dogs stood between Rick and anyone who tried to get to him.  They so stood until my Rick’s dad arrived. 

Lots of people just walk off, some in search of adventure and others because they are already lost.  There are others who are walked off, taken from where they are to where they would not go by others.  At the end of the day, how one becomes lost no longer matters.  It is being lost that matters, and there are very few experiences worse than being lost.

Perhaps you are among those who understand the terror of being lost because either you have been lost or you are lost.  If so, you know how utterly hopeless the lost become. 

I’m not using lost in the manner in which it is often used in Christian circles.  We’ve cheapened that word as we have cheapened so many other good words—grace, hope, mercy, love, etc.  When I speak of lost, I’m talking about the sense of being totally separated from all that is good and sound, of being alone and frightened even of ourselves, of being alive but without any sense of purpose or direction, and of being damned with no hope of rescue, much less redemption.

I’ve known some lost people, and I’ve known some good people who thought they knew the solution to the lost people’s predicament.  He/She just needs to find Jesus.  These folks mean well, but they do not understand the nature of being lost.  When one is lost, truly lost, he/she can’t find Jesus, or anything else.  Oh, they may stumble across something or someone or maybe even Jesus, but whatever is in their path was there before they found it and stumbled over it.  In the midst of being lost, that over which they stumble is sometimes just another frustration and pain in the dark.

The saved or the found, to use another misused word from our faith, are not those who find Jesus.  The saved/found are those who have been found by Jesus—Jesus as in God in all the Divine fullness.  Ezekiel, that prophet with the wild visions, got it.  He saw people who were lost everywhere he looked.  The people he saw were cut off from all that gave meaning, direction, purpose, and hope to their lives.  He knew that the difference between being lost and found was the willingness to be found, not dogged determination to find one’s own way out and home.

Of the lost—then and now, God said, “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak. . .” (Ezekiel 34:15-16).

For too long, I thought I had to find God.  How refreshing to do know that God is the One looking for me.  Even I shall be found!