The Lost Sheep Passage
3 So he told them this parable: 4 “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
Luke 15:4-7
I was the only person born in my extended family born with a profound wanderlust. They all live in Florida with very few instances of living out of the state for a year only to return to the clan. From the time I was a child, I wanted to go with anyone who was going out of the house. I went alone on vacations with my grandparents, and by the time I was a teen working my first job, I was saving all my money for various trips out of the country with the school or mission trip with my youth group. In the 15 years of marriage, we have moved 11 times.
The problem with my wanderlust is that I was also born with an extraordinarily horrible sense of direction. I think it comes from my dyslexia. I always turn the wrong direction when I head out of a restaurant towards the car. I get lost in doctor’s offices and need a map for amusement parks. I once got on a bus that was heading in the wrong direction and didn’t realize it until I ended up in a different city. If google map’s little voice feature were sentient, it would curse me out for not following directions better.
I am sure that you can imagine how wanderlust plus a lousy sense of direction can cause some problems. When it is just me getting, lost… well that is one thing. When I accidentally got half of an entire tour group lost, well…
When I was 16 years old, I work for a year in my church’s office as an assistant secretary (aka: envelop licker and copy monkey). I save all my money for an elective trip to Europe with my school. This year they were doing a whirlwind tour of Munich, Germany; Austria; Paris, France; and then London, England. The trip was one of the most significant sources of funny stories I have, but it was also a highlight of my teenage life only fueling my wanderlust more.
Our tour guide was a quirky British ex-history professor, tweed suit and all. He led our tour group by lifting his long, closed, black umbrella high in the air above the crowds of people so we could follow him around the streets of each of the cities we visited. Being a naturally curious person, I regularly engaged the adults on the trip with questions about all sorts of subjects. I find that older men, especially, love to expound on their well of knowledge. We had multiple such wellsprings of fascinating stories in our group. While in Paris, I had engaged my principal’s husband in an in-depth conversation about the history of Joan of Arc. We strolled the wide, crowded sidewalks in the middle of the pack of our tour group heading back to our hotel from seeing Notre Dame. Suddenly, in mid-stride. I stopped. Confused, so did my principle’s husband. So did the entire tour group behind me.
Why did I stop?
I had lost the black umbrella.
All I saw before me was crowds of people, and I had no idea where I was. Everyone began to ask me why I had stopped, which embarrassed me more. Was EVERYONE following ME? I explained that I had lost sight of our tour guide, and then it occurred to the others that they had too. As is natural for the grown men in the group, they got irritated and wanted to “save” the group by figuring out where we were and where we should go. Unfortunately, we were all lost. It occurred to me at that moment that everyone, nearly twenty of us, had been following me a child with no sense of direction, as I was following the tour guide because of my habit of wear a very noticeable navy blue driver’s cap. It just stuck out. Luckily, it was less than 30 mins later before the tour guide found us and all was well again.
You know, in the hundreds of times I have heard the parable of the lost sheep, I never once saw myself as the lost sheep. I was always one of the ones who was safe at home while the Shepherd looked for those naughty unsaved people “out there.” I was good. I had been a Christian since I was young. I didn’t get spiritually lost. Or do I?
Getting lost is a tricky thing because it rarely happens when you are worried about getting lost. If I have my map, google maps on my phone, and had studied my course the previous day, I typically do okay. The worse cases of getting lost almost always happens when I either think I know my way or I am following someone who I think knows the way. As Christians, we do get lost at times for the same reasons. We follow other Christians unthinkingly or a pastor without verifying his words in the scriptures. Sometimes, we just stroll along in our Christian habits without reassessing our course in prayer, Bible study, and Christian counsel. One day we feel like we are doing just fine, and then suddenly we look up and say, “What happened?”
Don’t feel like a horrible Christian when this happens to you. Many of us have been there. I have this year, in fact. I looked up one day and realized I had stopped using my prayer journal, stopped making time to pray at all, stopped reading the Bible, and pretty much existed as a Sunday Christian. Life had just gotten too busy. I never intend to stop those things. I just forgot them multiple days in a row, until it was months since I had last done them. I looked up one day and discovered I was “lost” and didn’t know where the Shephard was leading. I felt empty. I felt confused. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. It was those things I had done in the past that had kept me strong and on course. When I got busy, I really needed to focus harder on my Shepherd, not less.
Some of us are there now. Even many of the heroes of the Bible were there, such as Joseph in prison, Moses in the desert crying out to God, Elijah praying for God to kill him while hiding in the mountains from Jezebel, David after he sinned with Bathsheba, or Peter when he denied Christ three times. We all get lost at times, but God is patient with us as a good parent would be with a lost child. His concern is for our safety. He comes and finds us. It isn’t our job the punish ourselves when we fail. Instead, we look to the good Shephard who comforts us in our weaknesses and mistakes.
We are all the lost sheep some times, but that also means we get to be found too and that’s when the party begins.
Check out my young adult fantasy fiction novels HERE for something optimistic and fun.
If you like this article, consider subscribing to my quarterly newsletter.
What do you think?