Lost
“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Luke 19:10
I try to keep track of what I am doing but I just don’t seem to do a great job of it. I once lost a coffee cup for 2 months, I seem to be always looking for my eyeglasses or sunglasses, my favorite pen, my tea cup, my earbuds, my phone…and the list continues. I just keep an eye out for them knowing they will turn up eventually, possibly, hopefully. BUT, the one thing I lost that left me frantic were my engagement and wedding rings.
Now, I didn’t always wear my rings. So to not have them on all the time was nothing to stress over. That was, however, until the day I went to put them on and couldn’t find them. I suddenly realized that the last time I had seen them on me was when we were carrying furniture into the house and I took them off to keep them “safe” in my shirt pocket and that was a month before. A loud scream was all I could manage upon that realization.
I ran and checked the shirt, the pants then the floor of the closet. No luck. Now, Imagine me tearing the house apart looking for my rings. I started looking in all the obvious places. No luck. Then I started looking in all the unusual places. No luck. Now I am truly panicked. I started looking in all the really, really weird places. No luck. Every day looking in a different area in the house. Any place I could think of to sweep, shake out, tear apart again and again. Drawers, closets, cabinets…. Checking every piece of clothing with pockets and not only mine but my husband’s and the children’s clothing. Nothing. Every day I prayed I would find the rings. No luck. This went on every single day! Every single day I’d look in an area for my rings.
Flash forward to a year later, I’m hauling a load of laundry from the girl’s room and about to go downstairs when I heard a clunk. I look down and there are my rings!! I was overjoyed, elated, excited, happy, relieved…add any other adjectives you can think of to explain how happy I was. After one full year, my rings have fallen at my feet!
I usually have to have Bible parables explained to me in vibrant, full contact reality to fully understand them. In this case, I had two for the price of one! Now I know how, in the parables of the Lost Coin and the Shepherd and the Lost Sheep, what Jesus was trying to say to us.
There was the woman who kept searching for her lost coin. Even though she had nine other coins she kept searching for that one lost coin. She wouldn’t give up.
Then there was the Shepherd who counted 99 sheep but he should have had 100. He did not give up searching for it until he found the one lost sheep.
Jesus is telling us that He won’t give up searching for any of us who get lost. A lost soul is as precious to Him as all the other souls that are saved. We can never go so far from Him that He can’t find us and bring us back to Him.
Prayer: Lord, thank you for always seeking us if we wander away and never gives up on us. Forgive us for the times we get lost and lose sight of You. Thank you for being the light that leads us back to You. In Jesus name. Amen.
Epilogue: Can you imagine my shock at seeing my rings on the floor at my feet? It was as if they fell from the sky. I had looked at every article of clothing I was carrying. They had been washed at least a 100 times in that year. The closet they came from had been cleared out, swept out, checked with a flashlight. No rings were ever there. It’s still a mystery to this day.
