Embrace the Lostness

When I lived in Atlanta the seven mile-drive between home and work could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes depending on the traffic. At least until the freeway burned blocks away from my apartment.

Lost & Found by Lisle Gwynn Garrity, A Sanctified Art

For months, I couldn’t drive my “normal” route to work. And so, each morning as I headed out the door, I plugged the office address into my phone and began driving. And each morning I found myself in entirely new parts of the city. I rarely drove the same route more than once.

In some sense it was a hassle; the drive suddenly required me to pay attention to the route rather than mindlessly driving the same route over and over. But the truth is, my drives to and from work still took anywhere from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes. In that sense, the detours didn’t really cost me anything, but I got to see places I might never have seen otherwise.

It’s a rather benign story of being lost (and if I’m honest, thanks to GPS, I was never truly lost). But something happens when we leave the predicable paths and set out on new ones. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Once you leave the path, the unpredictable territory is full of life.”

We tend to go out of our way to avoid the experience of being lost. But what if lostness is just part of life, especially the life of faith?

When we think of being lost, we tend to think of being in an unfamiliar place without directions. Being lost is taking a wrong turn and ending up somewhere we haven’t been.

Author Debi Thomas imagines lostness this way, “It means we lose our sense of belonging, we lose our capacity to trust, we lose our felt experience of God’s presence, we lose our will to persevere. Some of us get lost when illness descends on our lives and God’s goodness starts to look not-so-good. Some of us get lost when death comes too soon and too suddenly for someone we love, and we experience a crisis of faith that leaves us reeling. Some of us get lost when our marriages die. Some of us get lost when our children break our hearts. Some of us get lost in the throes of addiction, or anxiety, or lust, or unforgiveness, or hatred, or bitterness.”

Broadly speaking, we can experience lostness anytime or anywhere. It’s the moments life doesn’t go as planned, moments we find ourselves in what’s called the “messy middle” where we’ve left one known place or experience and don’t yet know what lies ahead.

But the thing is, as Taylor points out, God does some of God’s best work with people who are lost. So maybe, we should learn to embrace the lostness. Maybe lostness can even become a spiritual practice.

Grace and peace,

Kimmy