I Once was Lost..

Have you ever been lost? Then you know that feeling of despair welling up within you driving you to do desperate things to get someone’s attention. Your whole life passes before your eyes in a few minutes and you crave for the simplest of things – the safety of your home, the annoying company of people you took for granted and so on. Being lost in an unfamiliar territory is a nightmare. The dangers that surround you are inexplicable.

But do you know what is worse than being lost? ? It is being lost and not realising you are lost. I was driving to work last week and the scene was something like this .There was a steady stream of hundreds of cars on a four lane road.A pedigree rottweiler dog was limping smack in the middle of the road , amidst the ocean of vehicles.One slip and he would be road sauce on the highway! It was very clear to me the dog was lost but he didn’t know it. The look on his face said it all!

Being a dog lover I was furious with the owners. How could they let this happen? Did they abandon him on the highway or was he really lost? I tried stopping my car but the highway rat race prevented me. When I took a U-turn I was silently praying in my heart ‘Lord please send a sensible person to rescue this dog if I don’t reach on time’ . As I anticipated when I made my way back to the spot the dog was not to be seen.

But the Lord heard my prayer. His invisible hand of divine providence was protecting this dog from the dangers on the road. He had sent a person who recently lost his rottweiler a month ago to rescue him. This person was more than happy to give this dog a permanent home – something I was not capable of giving him.

I understood now the parable of the lost sheep. Many of us are lost in certain areas of our lives and we don’t even know it. The Lord alone knows where and how to look for us and when he finds us he never gives us temporary solutions but permanent remedies. This is why we must wait for the Lord and allow him to find us because when people try to fix us they end up breaking us more than before.

Nathanael said to him “How do you know me? “
Jesus answered him “Before Philip called you when you were under the fig tree, I saw you”
Nathanael answered him ” Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel! “
-John 1:47-49

“Anyone searching for something that is lost does not look in one place only but in many different places.See then, that is how God has to seek you, in all kinds of ways. Let him find you then, in every different way, in every turn of fate that befalls you, wherever it comes from, through whomever he chooses, in whatever belittlement, in whatever humiliation….”

-Johannes Tauler