Feeling a Little Lost

I grew up for the majority of my childhood in the small city of Hudson, New York. But when I was 14 years-old and about to enter high school, my parents moved from our urban neighborhood in Hudson to the boondock town of Earlton, New York. Earlton sounds like a town in the boonies. I mean, the difference between Hudson and Earlton was night and day.

Eventually, I grew to love the rural landscape and the woods. My love of poetry began there in Earlton, walking in the woods and sitting in front of the pond down the hill. However, one of the most harrowing experiences of my adolescence happened there in the Catskill foothill town. I was 15 years old. The summer of 1986. One late summer’s day I took a walk in the woods, further than I ever had. I went so far that, you guessed it, I got lost. I mean really lost. A “I have no compass and it was getting dark” kind of lost. I began to panic, I’ll be honest. I kept walking, not knowing where to.

The feeling of being lost, there’s little else that is as scary. I began to think the worst. I began to think of my mother worried sick. This led to me remembering the distraught look on her face as she prayed over 7-year-old me laying on the ground after being hit by a car.

Then I began worrying about the sounds I heard, each noise akin to the siren of the ambulance driving me to the hospital. There were coyotes, bobcats, and bears in the Catskills and I began to fixate on coming across one.

Being lost, even for an hour, was excruciating.

Until you are lost no more.

Our gospel reading presents the familiar parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. These parables precede perhaps the greatest known parable of Jesus, the lost son parable.

Have you ever felt lost? Do you know what it feels like to be lost? To be a sheep caught in a thicket with no hope of escape? To be a young man, miles from home, with no hope of being welcomed home.

During my first years of pastoral care training, I was called to the emergency room. A young couple, immigrants who spoke only Spanish, just lost their 4-year-old son in a freak accident in a parking lot. The couple desperately wanted the boy baptized despite his death. A nurse would join me to translate.

I’d never been so taken aback by a job facing me. I never felt so unprepared either. How can I do this? That was my first question. But I went.

I felt lost in that moment facing the family and seeing that precious little boy, lifeless before us. A deer caught in the headlights kind of lost. Of course, I thought of my own experience of being hit by a car and how fortunate my family and I were and how unfortunate this boy and his family were. So many emotions in that moment. I felt overwhelmed, at a loss for words. All I could do was baptize the child and pray.

I was beyond thankful that the Spanish speaking nurse was with me. We got through it together.

I’ve never been as lost in a moment as a pastor. It was a moment of absolute heartache. My hospice work in the years ahead would be hard, and I would experience deaths of children in my work again, but that, that initial traumatic experience, was devastating.

After my shift that day, what did I do? I called home. I spoke with my mom, crying like a child.

By the grace of God, we find our way home. Or home finds us.


In our parable, the parable of the lost sheep, that one lost sheep doesn’t go ignored. God has a soft spot for the lost sheep among us. God goes running after us wayward, black sheep, the sheep who wandered off and got lost. That sheep caught in the thickets is grace-found and grace-saved, brought home.

But there’s a question to ponder. Being so desperately lost and then gracefully found, what does that do to us? Being blind so long to then receive sight, what does that do to us?

I’ve been reading a wonderful book titled Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life. The book is a biography of Dylan’s life, focusing on his spirituality. Of course, a big part of the book looks at Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in the late 70’s, known as his "Born Again" years.

Being born again is meant to change everything. It certainly did for Dylan.

A paradigm shift - that is what happens when we go from being lost to being found, from being blind to being sighted, from being spiritually dead to being spiritually born again.

I’ve never experienced a near-death experience. But a universal element to near-death experiences that folks detail is this – they see life in a completely different way. There’s a lightness of being for folks who’ve survived near-death experiences. There’s a transformation to how they see the world.

That is what is supposed to happen for us who’ve been born again in Christ. We no longer see the world in the same way. The world and it’s me-first, dog-eat-dog, and power-hungry ways seem foreign to us. The way the world works and functions no longer makes sense.

We feel lost in the world! We go from feeling lost in our own little worlds to feeling lost in the larger world! Interesting how that works, isn’t it?

Let me close with a thought. It’s only a thought. But I invite you to ponder it.

Maybe we’re meant to feel a little lost. Maybe feeling completely settled and safe in the world is not such a good thing. Maybe life is about being okay with feeling lost in the world, knowing God always finds us. Maybe embracing our own vulnerability is the key to the good life, the born-again life where God’s presence and God’s grace renews us every day.

One benefit of feeling a little lost in the world is this – we can understand the vulnerability others feel and from our vulnerability know how to love them more. In other words, knowing what it means to feel a little lost, we learn how to better follow Christ’s commandment to love others as ourself.

We are found sons and daughters in Christ and wayfaring strangers in the world – that is the Christian’s fate. Embrace that fate and keep loving people. Touching your own vulnerabilities, stand up for and with the vulnerable, keeping the faith. That is the Christian life.