Terrifying to be lost as a child . . . looking up in the mall and realizing my parents are gone. Where to go? What to do? Bliss when Mom and Dad found me! I once was lost and now I am found.
The Bible uses that image a good bit and it works for me. Jesus saves.
However, there is another sense of “lost” that GPS saves us from where we lose by being saved.
When Hope and I went on trips, we used to have the joy of getting “lost” in London. There we would bump into interesting places and people. We would take what the City gave us and have no plan. At times, as we grew tired, we worried, but mostly the sense of not being in control and not knowing where we were was delightful.
We were exploring.
Today my family got to go through an outdoor maze billed to us as “the second biggest in the United States.” Maybe.
We loved getting lost in it knowing our GPS was not sophisticated enough to save us.
Joy is being “lost” when all the outcomes are (likely) interesting or at worst tiring, bad to be lost when the outcome is loss of family, safety, and mortal danger. Being lost from God is to lose all hope of lasting goodness, truth, and beauty. The joy we find are just reminders that without God all will be lost. We can keep nothing.
Simultaneously God made an immense cosmos and set us free to wander in it. He knows where we are, but we don’t! What bliss this ought to be! If all of us wandered and were full of God’s wonder, then little harm would come to us. Natural death, an entrance into eternity, would be the worse thing that could happen and for a person ready to die, this is no great threat.
We would not be lost on important things, but blissfully unsure of all the surprises we might find. If we practice our faith, we soon discover that we know where we are going generally, Paradise, but have no clue how we in particular are going to get there! This is comforting and exhilarating. We will make it home, long way or short way through the maze, but there will be surprises, even a few dead ends, around every turn.
It is sin, our own, that produces fear and the sins of others that produce bad dangers that mess all this glorious plan up. Perhaps, also we have forgotten when to get lost and when to be found. We can carry GPS so as not to lose track of home, but perhaps we should often turn it off and allow a few “wrong turns.” We might find a better restaurant, a new neighborhood, some good friends. If nothing else, we can have an adventure.
Jesus can save us, GPS only keeps us from being lost . . . and sometimes I want to be lost so the right person can find me!
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