Sometimes when we lose our way in life, it’s like we’ve been whacked with a 4′ x 2′ in one of those old cartoons where the poor critter staggers about for a bit seeing stars and then comes to their senses quite quickly. Other times – the way has been lost incrementally, degree by degree over time without particular notice, but then one day something jolts us awake – and we find we are nowhere that we would have chosen to be – had we seen the end from the beginning.
It’s a very hard thing to know how to and IF to approach someone that has got lost in their way. Sometimes all we can do is wait beside them till the shock wakes them out of their daze.
It was my oldest brother who said to me years ago that the line back to God is always a direct one. We can be instantly restored to His presence if the ‘getting lost’ has been sin and the ‘getting found’ is repentance. By His grace we don’t have to retrace the wandering, being-lost steps to find Him again. There will likely be a period of healing and cleansing and renewing the mind – but He can be right beside us in it to help and guide us through.
Willingness is the start point.
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Thirty years ago I knew full well I was lost. It had happened incrementally, choice by choice, degree by degree, hand over hand I removed myself from His peace. It took about five years from the beginning of that process, to the recognition of it, to the point where I stopped and allowed His gentle hand to cup my ashamed face and lift it back to meet His gaze. I’ve taken much shorter trips away from His peace since then but it is the absence of that peace that has always been my wake up call.
On that day at about age 21, I sat on our bed and opened my long closed Bible and stopped where I found Psalm 131… Which said… “As a weaned child lies in the arms of its mother, so my heart is quiet within me”.
The presence or absence of a quiet heart is part of the way that He shepherds us. The absence of His peace is the stuff of madness to me and it always draws me home.
“I will lead the blind by ways they
have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the
darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the
things I will do; I will not forsake them”.
Isaiah 42:16
“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and STRAINING TOWARD what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus”
Philippians 3:12