Lost and found
‘Whenever we go into town as a family you’re always wandering off and getting lost.’ We are in a Cotswolds tearoom reminiscing about previous holidays and my wife is addressing our eldest daughter.
Daughter - ‘No, I’m not lost. I always know exactly where I am!’
Mother (a little indignantly) - ‘Well, you were lost to me.’
It was just good-humoured family banter. We were each feeling relaxed and enjoying a long weekend in the Cotswolds.
The area has a long history in the wool trade and there are still many sheep to be seen, heard and smelt! As one who reads the Bible quite a bit, the proximity of so many sheep invariably turns my thinking towards those verses (and there are very many of them) which use the analogy of sheep and Shepherd. Probably the most famous portion using this theme is Psalm 23 ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll not want’. In the New Testament, Jesus tells of the lost sheep which the Shepherd, leaving the 99, goes in search of and, having found it, carries it back home to the flock. Now, here’s the thing, did that sheep consider itself lost or is the point of the story that it was lost to the Shepherd?
At this point I’ll go back to our weekend away in the Cotswolds and to the caravan site where we were staying. My other daughter and I had just come out of the toilet block when we came across a lady who was obviously lost and a little bewildered. It turned out that she had been in the laundry room, which is integral to the other toilet block on the site. Having discovered that she needed coins to operate the washing machine, she walked out and headed for the site office to change a banknote. In the event, she took the wrong pathway and eventually came across the second toilet block; that bamboozled her. She now realised that she was lost but she had, in reality, been lost from the moment she started off in the wrong direction.
We may go for a long time not considering ourselves to be lost souls. God, on the other hand, says, ‘We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way’. In other words, as far as God is concerned, we are lost to him. It is for this reason that he sends Jesus as the Good Shepherd who goes out looking for his own lost sheep. He is even calling them by name because he knows them; indeed, according to the Bible, he has known them from before time even began. Is that an attractive notion to you? It certainly is to me.
Many, like my eldest daughter at the beginning of this article, are affronted when it is suggested that they are lost. The lady on the caravan site had to walk its full length before she realised her lost predicament. God is for today and in his word, the Bible, discourages us from having to walk the full length of this life before we come to realise our spiritual predicament.
He has sent Jesus to be the Good Shepherd. Jesus is still calling people back to God’s flock. Do you recognise his voice? We may be assured that he wants people like you and me to be able to say, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’.