Lost in manhattan
I got lost in Manhattan last week. Manhattan Illinois, that is.
Actually I wasn’t in Manhattan but somewhere outside, or around, or near Manhattan when I realized I was lost.
I had spent the morning with some dear staff from my church, talking about the gentle invitation of Jesus to “come, rest, and learn.” We had talked about centering on a promise that allowed us to step away from the expectations and competing priorities and to remember our identity.
The discussion was transparent, hopeful, and challenging. After lunch I had a scheduled call and I knew the straight, long farm roads of southern Will County would provide an easy enough drive so that I could give my attention to the call.
However, I wasn’t quite familiar with which numbered county roads would take me from the grey-brown winter farmland back home. So, I turned on the map on my phone and dialed in to my call.
What this trip required was a bit of switching between my phone call and the map display. I started off well, retracing my steps from earlier that morning, chatting about training for pastoral ministry. As the call progressed, and my trip progressed, I grew more comfortable with the direction and lost myself in conversation.
The word “lost” being key here.
Getting lost – whether while driving or losing our way in life – is a strange thing. Sometimes it happens in a moment, in a decision or an experience that twists our circuitry. Our lenses through which we see the world get fogged and smudged and we can’t see the way forward clearly.
Sometimes getting lost happens a little at a time. A moment tied to a minute stacked on a conversation and suddenly we ask, along with David Byrne, “How did I get here?”
I ended my call and immediately called my wife Holley.
“How did things go?” she asked.
“Pretty well, yeah,” I replied.
Just before she picked up. I came to an intersection and thought, “Oh, I set the map to take me home! That’s not going to work.” I had errands to run on the other side of town, and I wanted to be home sometime before the afternoon evaporated into evening and post-school duties. So I went straight instead of turning left as my maps app suggested.
Sometimes we get lost in an instant.
The next thing I knew I said, “Wait, I shouldn’t be driving into Bourbonnais, should I?”
Holley chuckled, “Eh, no.”
But that was indeed the case. I drove 25 miles in the opposite direction, turning what should have been a 30 minute drive home into a 65 mile roundtrip. When we are lost, it often takes quite some time to turn things around.
The word “lost” in Christian circles is often used as a descriptor of a group or a type of person, particularly an irreligious person. But if we’re honest, both religious and irreligious people get good and lost all the time.
I do appreciate the sentiment of the words “lost people matter to God” but the sentiment makes little sense when we realize we all get lost sometimes.
The point isn’t the lost-ness, it is instead the way we reorient and rediscover our proximity to God, to self, and to others.
When we feel lost in a time of emotional abuse, we need the compass of healthy and compassionate folks who help us find our way.
In times when our faith is changing, when all we can see is an unfamiliar wilderness around us, God brings spiritual directors along to say, “Yes, that’s normal.” In their comforting words we find our ground once again, even in the midst of our restlessness.
Our family, friends, or co-workers make comments that we’ve changed and we are not the same person we used to be. We hear these words and think, “Who am I now?” and we get lost in trying to find new defaults for the way we present ourselves to the world.
And then, just like that we begin to find new familiarities. We come to a new sense of ourselves.
Whether we are driving north from Manhattan, Illinois or navigating significant personal and spiritual changes – the truth is that if we never get lost we’ll miss out on what it means to be found once again.
