Dear Friends,

This week I returned home from my travels to the Nevada Desert, and I am still sifting through my duffle bags to sort out the supplies and belongings I hurriedly packed to avoid an oncoming dust storm. I have been searching without success for a small necklace I was gifted on the desert playa, certain that it must be in some pocket or crevice or pouch that I have overlooked.

In this week’s gospel, Jesus tells two stories about relentless searches for items that are lost. A shepherd leaves 99 of his sheep to find the one who has strayed. A woman sweeps her house for days on end to locate a misplaced coin, even though nine remain. Upon finding these lost items, both Shepherd and Woman rejoice. The time spent searching, though impractical or even “wasted” in our eyes, was worth every minute in theirs.

This has had me wondering about what it means to lose something and to be lost. The state of “lostness” isn’t necessarily cut and dry. Things, or people, can literally be lost, as are the sheep and the coin. Misplaced, an item’s value is suddenly at stake depending on the efforts to find it. Misdirected or misguided, being lost can result in being late, a missed appointment, for example. In both, the searching for mislaid things and the shortened time of a planned event, time seems to be lost, or “wasted” we tend to think.

In our gospel reading, the impetus for the two stories about lost things is the grumbling Jesus hears about his hospitality. He not only welcomes ne’er do wells and outcasts but eats with them too. “What a waste of time,” you can imagine his critics saying. Jesus not only finds the lost, but then celebrates when they are found—and spends time with them—valuable time.

I think this is important. Of course, sometimes the time it takes to find what you’ve lost seems like no time at all. But at other times the time seems excruciatingly long. Sometimes what you have lost is actually good riddance and other times you feel the weight of the loss only after the search ends up empty-handed. Sometimes you can identify why you feel lost and other times you simply feel unmoored—unable to give a name or reason for a sense of confusion, disorientation, bewilderment, abandonment, loneliness—all of which can be manifestations of lostness.

As one who has reckoned with “lostness” through my ministry to others and in my own life, I have seen the value of sitting in that in-between “wasted” time between losing and finding. Because it is there that the reason for the lostness is often realized, or its worth discovered. The time searching, the time stuck in that anxious presence of not knowing where you are, or not knowing the location of what you have lost, is the time needed, the time necessary to recalibrate meaning—the meaning of that which you have lost, the meaning of your own lostness.

As we shift gears from the slower pace of summer to the busy-ness of fall, I invite us all to spend some time in the “in between time” of lost and found and trust that Jesus chooses to hang out there as well — between uncertainty and clarity, self-doubt and courage, dismay, and joy.

In Christ,

Amelie+