In almost nine years of our parenting, neither of our daughters has ever been lost or even out of sight long enough to raise alarm. Until this summer.
On a bike ride in my parents’ neighborhood, our youngest broke away from the pack and nearly lapped us all before realizing she couldn’t see us behind her. She turned around and back again, unable to recognize her grandparents’ house.
As frightening as it must have been for her, it was worse for her mother.
Scary search
After a quick search on foot was unsuccessful, I jumped in my car and started praying she would be around the next corner. And then there she was, standing uncertainly on the sidewalk. I told her I had prayed we’d find her, and she said she had prayed too. As relief settled in, I tried to ease her fear. “You just got turned around. We were really close the whole time, we just couldn’t see each other.”
We didn’t use the word lost, maybe because neither of us wanted to admit how scary even that brief separation had been. “Turned around” is temporary. Lostness carries with it the specter of permanence. Some lost things are never found.
I’ve been thinking about lostness ever since that scary two minutes, spiritual lostness in particular. It strikes me that when we’re lost, we may not know it for a while. Until something shakes us from the direction we were headed, and we realize we don’t know where we’re going or why. Dead in the trespasses and sins in which we once walked, Paul writes in Ephesians 2, “following the course of this world.”
‘But God’
“But God,” he writes a few verses later, launching into a clear explanation of the mercy required to bring us out of lostness, to turn us around from the path we were heading down toward something new.
At a meeting with new coworkers years ago, we went around the table and each told how we had become a Christian. One man sitting across from me only got a few words out before his voice broke.
“I’ve just never gotten over it,” he said. I don’t remember anything particularly dramatic about his testimony, but I haven’t forgotten how keenly he understood his own lostness, and what it meant to him — still — to have been found.
How grateful I am for a God who finds — children turned around in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and sinners such as me.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Meredith Flynn and originally published by the Illinois Baptist.
