Psalm 42 "Lost!"

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         The image that has remained with me is one of legs.  It is one of my very earliest memories.  I was quite small at the time, so the legs were rather large – in the sense of being very tall – like tree trunks.  Pants, most likely brown corduroy or beige gabardine, covered some of those legs.  Others of them were encased in nylon stockings.

         One minute I had been standing next to a set of the nylon-stocking legs (which belonged to my mother), and the next minute I found myself standing next to a completely different set of legs – also encased in nylon but legs attached to a body I had never seen before.  All of a sudden, it seemed that I was in the midst of a forest of legs – long adult legs surrounding me on every side and moving now in every direction. 

         I was lost – right there in a department store on Fifth Avenue in New York City in the midst of the Christmas shopping rush.  Oh, I was not lost for long – maybe a couple of minutes that, of course, seemed like an eternity to my childish mind.  Then my mother took my hand, and all was well.

         It was the first time I had ever been lost – and it would prove not to be the last time either.  There was the instance coming home at the end of an afternoon of catching frogs at Pinney’s Pond. My friends had gone along before me, and when I came - by myself for the first time - to that fork in the path, I was not sure which way to turn.  The path had always seemed straight and clear cut on previous afternoons when I had been with a cadre of fellow frog-hunters. 

         And then, of course, there was the day at Ghost Ranch just two years ago.  A dense fog blanketed the trail I was hiking, and the trail markers that had seemed so obvious when I was ascending now had seemed to disappear.

         I do not know if you have ever been physically lost or experienced times like those I just described.  However, I am certain that all of us here have been lost in other, even more life-threatening or transformative ways.

         For me, there was the night before I had to declare a major in college.  Would I concentrate on religion - or history – maybe even art history? 

        And there was the decision to go to seminary.  Could God really be calling me to New Haven, Connecticut?  Or was Yale Divinity School just a place that would be more intellectually stimulating and way more fun than living with my parents and working as a secretary and a Howard Johnson’s waitress on the weekends?

         And also there was the decision to leave the ministry for a while and go back to graduate school in something completely different.   Come to think of it:  I have spent a good portion of my life getting lost in what seemed at the time to be overwhelmingly dark and forbidding places. 

         However, in each case, somehow I had been found again.  And believe me:  The “being found” part has given me not only great comfort over the years but has also provided an impetus for me to take some risks I would not have taken otherwise.  And if you look at it that way, getting lost, then, has been a gift.

         As the Spirit continues to lead us on this Lenten journey, I hope that we are beginning to understand that those dark places in our lives that we keep coming across need not always be fear-filled.  They need not be places of weakness where we feel doomed to come up short or feel less than perfectly faithful.

          I hope we are learning that good and wonderful things can and do happen in the dark.  Seeds begin to sprout in the darkness of the soil.  In the dark, sperm and egg unite, cells divide, and a fetus takes on human characteristics and matures enough to be born.  Caterpillars are transformed into butterflies in the darkness of a cocoon or a chrysalis.  And God only knows what actually happened in that tomb between Good Friday and the dawn of Easter!

         On this Lenten journey where we are learning to walk in the dark, we have discovered unusual and unexpected good things – gifts - along the way, gifts that we may not think of as gifts at first, but gifts none-the-less that we find at those times when we are most unsettled and unsure of ourselves. So far, we have found that times of uncertainty and emptiness, and even the madness and mayhem and chaos of the storms that inevitably rock and roll through our lives can, in fact, be gifts. 

         Getting lost – or feeling lost – is another one though it sure does not seem so at the time.  I mean, who likes that sudden sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, the sweaty palms, and the pounding of your heart when you suddenly realize that you do not have a clue where you are going.  Getting lost hardly seems like a gift then!  Rather, it is something we would avoid if we could.

         I mean, have you noticed that as long as the path we are on is straight – or, at least well marked – we do fine?  We have a plan for our lives.  We are happily married.  We have children, and they have children.  We have a job – maybe not the most exciting one we imagined having in our callow youth, but it will take us to retirement – when we will play golf and go south in the winter.  There it is: Life as we would have it in a nutshell!

         But what happens when our path unexpectedly turns left or right – with no clear marker to show us the way?  A child dies.  We lose our job. The cancer we never in a million years anticipated takes its toll.

         What happens when we come to a fork in the road?  The marriage that we thought was strong enough to survive anything as long as we both shall live unravels, and we cannot stop it. The stock market eats away at our 401K until we do not feel safe retiring.  We are bored playing golf. 

         What happens when our lives seem to be spinning out of control?  What happens when we do not know where we are going?  What happens when we are lost and feeling so alone?  What happens when, like the Psalmist, we lament:

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?”

My tears have been my food, day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”

How in heaven’s name can those times that are so laden with stress and fear and a feeling that we are so alone:  How can those times ever be a gift?

        Wendell Berry once wrote, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”  Perhaps those times of getting lost force us to realize that, much as we might desire it, life is not a straight path.  It is filled with zigs and zags, and sometimes it even heads in the opposite direction than the one we thought we should be going. 

         Perhaps those times of getting lost remind us that the destination may not be the most important thing after all.  And if that is the case, maybe we need to breath a bit easier during those times we think we are lost.  After all, as Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien put it, “not all who wander are lost.” 

         Maybe we need to embrace the idea that life is about the journey – and all the twists and turns that come along the way.  Maybe, as UCC pastor and author Eric Eines writes, we need to embrace the idea that “from path to path we go.”

         Maybe the fact of wandering is not such a bad thing, and wandering does not necessarily mean that we are lost anyway.  As poet David Wagoner put it, “wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.” Maybe, then, we need to enjoy the blessings that come with each step - even if we can only see one step ahead.  Maybe we need to just relax a bit – and enjoy the ride.  Enjoy the scenery.  Enjoy the journey.  As the TV ads for Ancestry.com all end with: “You don’t have to know what you’re looking for; you just have to start looking.”

         But what about those times of being lost that are too fearful and too dark to enjoy at all?  What then?

         Maybe those times of feeling lost can also prompt us to pay more careful attention to the little signs along the way that the Holy Spirit might be sending us – because surely the Spirit swirls about somewhere nearby. 

         Think about it: That is a fact we often conveniently forget when we are striding down the path of our lives so confidently that we barely look at where we are going, where we have been, or who we have stepped on getting from there to here.  Oh yes, we do tend to take things for granted.  We do tend to be less aware of and less discerning about where the Holy might quietly and subtly be nudging us.  
         Though we talked last week about God speaking in those flashes of intuition, those thunderous “aha” moments, God also speaks in the quiet times, the little times that we might miss were we not feeling a bit lost and alone, were we not deliberately seeking a path forward.  So – perhaps those times of getting lost can be times to step back and pay closer attention and to take stock of ourselves and of where we are in the silence – and who might be with us.

       A man once had a dream.  He was standing on a dock, looking out across the water, when suddenly another man he had not noticed standing with him on the dock jumped in. As he watched the man sink he knew he had to jump in after him.

       He started swimming down and down . . . and way down at the bottom he could see that the man was there. Then he realized he was running out of breath.

       He had to make a choice - to keep going down, or to lose the man, turn around and make his way to the surface and the fresh air waiting for him there.

       He decided to keep going. And as he went deeper, he realized two things. First, the man there in the sand, at the bottom of the lake, was himself. And second, as he went down, he discovered he could breathe under water.

       Surely his dream was reminding him that this journey of life – in addition to not being a straight line - can also be deep, and yet we cannot abandon ourselves in the depths. We cannot always remain lost – nor will we - because the dark night of the soul is not the end of our story.  There is always someone who wants to help us find our way out – a friend or mentor who grabs our hand, a cloud of prayers, a loving God. 

       As United Church of Christ pastor Ian Lynch blogged, “God is like that, leading us out into the wild yonder where we get lost in the vastness only to then assure us of how precious and incredibly important we are to God who loves each of us madly. Surely there are messages for us embedded in all the ‘here’s’ where we find ourselves.” 

       So – in those times you feel lost – do not panic.  Stop.  Take a breath.  And understand that wandering for a while may be moments to be savored rather than feared. 

       Do not panic.  Stop.  Take a breath.  And listen for the Spirit in the silence, nudging you until you find your bearings once again.

       Do not panic.  Stop.  Take a breath.  And if all else fails, and you still are lost, then maybe it is time to simply stand still and trust that you will be found.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine