When We Lose Our Way
Sadly, I’d come to think that Christians were the found ones and other-than-Christian people were lost. But according to Jesus, even those who identify themselves with his name can be lost.
Saying Jesus’ name, seeing ourselves as his followers, doing works, routines, and habits with others who also name him, doesn’t prevent us from going off course (Matt. 7:21-23).
I’d also thought that being lost was a shaming thing, like declaring “you’re hopeless,” or exclaiming, “how could you?” or shouting, “What have you done?!” Perhaps I put lostness in this wag-my-finger space because I mistakenly and self-righteously thought of myself as a “found one” so different and other than “unfound ones” (Lk. 18:9-14).
Perhaps I thought negatively of lostness because I forgot that lost means not knowing where you are or how to get where you’d hoped to go. A lost one is vulnerable to harm, needy for direction. When someone pulls up in a parking lot, wearily rolls down their window, and anxiously asks, “Could you tell me where I am?” or “Do you happen to know where such and so street is?” most of us feel compassion, not derision. If a child gets lost, we’ll unite and swarm like honey- bees scouring for precious nectar.
It’s true. A blind-spot person can be lost and not know it; believe they are found though they’ve gone adrift. But if you love this person even amid moments of anger or frustration, deep down you mostly feel sad, tragic, full of longing.
Perhaps I thought it a cussword to be lost simply because I’d forgotten who it was that used this metaphor to begin with and how it was he spoke of it.
Some Reasons We Lose our Way
Jesus uses three short stories to describe why we get lost.
In Jesus’ first short story, he likens one who is lost to a sheep who wandered off from its flock and shepherd. This sheep didn’t set out to get lost. It just wandered a bit, which gradually led to a bit more wandering, and before it knew it, this sheep just no longer did a day with the flock or its shepherd. People are like this. We have no particular complaint. We fondly remember. We’ve simply gone on without the flock and shepherd of earlier days and instead made a life out of what we wandered toward (Lk. 15:3-7).
In Jesus’ second short story, others of us are lost like a misplaced coin. Unlike sheep adrift (and unlike the two sons in Jesus’ third story), a coin has no will. A coin does not choose to be off course. Jesus startles us by giving language to the feeling of being misplaced or mishandled, the feeling we’ve been lost by accident and it looking like the fault of God. (Lk. 15:8-10).
Jesus’ third story pictures some of us as losing our way like frowning children. Like the child who ran away, our lives go in circles because we’ve thrashed about and resisted what is good. We just don’t love the God Jesus speaks of in comparison to our love for things like money or sex or autonomy. But these other loves let us down and now we aren’t sure where to go from here. Or like the child who stayed, some of us depend upon what this God gives us but we frown into lostness because we feel God’s provision is never enough and ought to have been more. By not giving us what we most wanted, God let us down. Either way, our frowning complaints about God and life are many. We sailboat with no wind.
Jesus goes on to add a fourth reason for losing one’s bearings.
We can go missing when trying to survive misuses of power. This story is no fiction. Jesus met an oppressed man who “sold out.” He had to haggle for financial security, barter for physical safety, and scrap together pieces of respect by maneuvering through frenzied mazes of ethnic, religious, and political savagery (Lk. 19:1-9). He wasn’t the only one in Jesus’ orbit who tried to survive this way. Within Jesus’ original twelve students, Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot represent getting lost by trying to survive.
Sometimes when we are trapped within such fly-infested cultural or institutional webs, we trade away valuables of body and soul; something one cannot do without irreparable damage to oneself. We lose ourselves by trying to save ourselves.
What Could It Feel Like to Be Found Again?
Is there someone you care about who’d resonate with any of Jesus’ four scenes? Or can you find your own story reflected in their mirror? Jesus said he searches for lost persons like these (Lk. 19:10). And this is my point. The disposition of Jesus toward our being lost in this world differed profoundly from the shunning bible talkers and de-churched grumblers of his day. Jesus didn’t see lostness as a pejorative the way I subtly had.
Instead of “I told you so” or “good riddance,” Jesus pictures being found by him as cause for celebration! A party with friends, a banquet of food, a celebration of music and dancing, a homecoming, where we who were lost are found and finally home!
