Getting Lost

Back to Garmin. Nancy gave it to me for Father’s Day. We found out pretty quickly that you don’t need it to navigate places you know well. At home, Garmin leads a lonely, quiet life. Out in LA, though, Garmin was a life-saver. Driving in totally strange places, we never once got lost, unless we ignored the directions, which was an option we actually chose once.

What we could see from the freeways was so limited. The winding drives up the mountains where palatial mansions clung by inches to vertical hillside foundations kept begging us to come have a closer look-see. We decided to listen to whatever voice was calling us up those unknown pathways, to take a closer look, without directions. We just wanted to drive wherever the road took us. We weren’t afraid of getting lost. We knew that, when we were ready, Garmin would tell us exactly where we were on the planet and how to get back home. Getting lost was the cost of exploring a world you just can’t appreciate from a distance.

Letting your children go off to college, you can’t realistically pray that they won’t ever get lost. They will. Sometimes, horribly lost. Sometimes, lost for a long time. What you can pray is that they will have the courage to explore unknown pathways. (I didn’t know until horribly late that education’s synonym is “exploration.”) A huge part of me believes that the day we won’t ever take an unknown road for fear of getting lost is the day we stop living, no matter how many more years we keep driving. I want Cameron to explore. I know that this all comes with the very real risk that he will get lost sometimes. I take my courage, my eternal hope, in God’s raw, unconditional grace.

Years ago, Cameron asked Jesus into his heart. Letting me lower him into the water, he made his profession from the baptistery as he arose symbolically to a new life as a faith trailblazer. In a time, a place and a way no human mind could ever grasp, the Jesus who had known and loved him before he was even born became an even more intimate part of his life that day, one of the benefits of which is the presence of God’s Spirit in Cameron’s heart. A kind of spiritual Garmin, if you will, is always present with him, even when he chooses to ignore the directions.

My hope comes in knowing that getting lost is a part of life, even of faith. I can’t explain this as much as I trust it. But, the best stories of my life and the best part of my faith were forged while stumbling through lost places, looking for a way back home, even when I was lost because I chose to be. Like I said, I can’t really explain how God’s unconditional grace just won’t give up on us. I do believe with all my heart that grace never, in all of eternity, ever gives up. God is the eternal shepherd, never resting until the last single lost sheep is found, even when they behave like bad-tempered goats.

As he leaves for LA and whatever unknown roads await him there, I can also hope that Cameron has seen in me a good witness of what it’s like to get lost and still believe. Losing is an invaluable part of faith exploration. When he is lost, there will still be that still, small voice within his heart. If Cameron will just listen, that voice will lead him back home, no matter how lost he is, no matter how long he’s been lost, no matter why he got lost.

That’s how God is. There is no place on this planet where God is not already present. We can never go where God is not, and, therefore, where we cannot be found. Joy happens the day we personally discover just how much God loves exploring, too, looking for his lost children, and leading them back home.