Lost and Found.

For the past few weeks, one particular passage of Scripture has flooded my thoughts – the parable of the lost sheep. My gut told me that after I completed the ABC’s series, this would be a topic to write about. And then, wouldn’t you know, this morning’s Gospel reading was this parable. Perhaps I cannot ignore this prompting much longer.

When I get into a really deep funk, I find myself wanting to watch Girl, Interrupted. Not exactly an uplifting, boost your spirits kind of a film, but I am drawn to two particular scenes. One is when Winona Ryder’s character has her break through moment and decides not to play the part of crazy girl any more. It is a decisive moment in which she chooses healing rather than succumb to her depressive thoughts. The second scene is the climax of the movie. Angelina Jolie’s character begins shouting to her small audience of fellow mental patients, “There are just too many buttons. Why doesn’t someone come and push my buttons and tell me the truth about me . . . .” I resonate strongly with this desire to be found; for someone to come and rip the truth out of me.

There are no kind words to describe being lost. Panic and terror scratch the surface. The world is confusing. It is difficult to orient one’s self. When we are emotionally lost, it is difficult to discern the truth about our self. For Angelina Jolie’s character, the truth she believed about herself is that she was a “slut, a whore, and her parents wished she were dead.” When we are disoriented, the lies of the world can seem like our actuality. In my own state of loss, I longed for someone to reflect my perceived truth – I was damage goods, unlovable, and not worthy to be alive. I looked for mirrors to reflect my self-image of lies. I dated a few men that confirmed my perceptions. I aligned myself with a few toxic friends and systems that validated my internal beliefs. In the world of psychobabble, we would call this a self-fulfilling prophecy. We find what we believe.

Because the world I associated with confirmed my own lies, I had no reason to not believe the same held for God. God was distant and uncaring. I was unlovable even to God. My image of God was no different than the images I had of the world and my fellow human beings.

I did not know I was lost. I did not know I had oriented myself to lies.

My path back to God has come by grace. I believe that God has been relentlessly pursuing me. Despite my kicking and screaming, despite my spitting in Jesus’ face, despite shaking my middle finger towards the heavens, God has not stopped looking for me. At some moment, perhaps in a series of several small moments over several long years, I stopped insisting that I was not lost. I stopped running away from the God who was chasing me. I fell on my face and reluctantly said, “Okay, you got me. You found me. Now show me who you are.”

I have spent the last year unlearning what I thought I knew about life, Jesus, religion, and myself. Many years ago while living in Vietnam, a friend said to me, “Put your head against the Shepherd’s chest and follow his heartbeat.” It took me ten years, but I believe this is how I am now oriented. I started getting up early, and then even earlier spending time reading, writing, praying, and mostly just trying to listen and learn. I had a spiritual director suggest to me that I simply allow Jesus to teach me who he is. I started reading the Gospels with open eyes. Who is this Jesus? I came to understand that God was not chasing me to be annoying, to shame me, or to force me into submission. What I discovered was a grieving Shepherd looking to bring me, his lost, scared, little sheep home.