“ONE DAY WHEN I WAS LOST…” [T, 4-19-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

[Next post will be F, 4-22-22]

Helen has a friend with memory problems. I’ll call her Frances, although that is not her name. They have met for coffee, alternating houses, each Tuesday morning at 10:30 for several years. But even though Helen calls Frances the day before, and the morning of, Frances rarely shows up at the right place on the right day at the right time. Then the tracking-down commences. When they finally get together, they have good conversations. It’s a lot of work for Helen, but she does it, because Frances is lonely and needs the fellowship.

“Well,” I say to Helen, “you have always said that when we got old, you wanted to be able to help our old friends through their final years, because that’s what old friends are for.” Frances is not an “old friend,” but she is an “old” friend. We don’t live where our old friends do, so we can’t help take care of them. But we have new “old” friends, and we can walk toward that “door at the end of the hall” with them.

Loneliness, and needing a friend who will come looking for you when you have forgotten to show up, are not confined to the elderly years, of course.

A story repeat, because it fits, and because I like it: When daughter Katie was a young teen, we were runners. On vacation, she went running in Custer State Park in the Black Hills. Night fell, and she got lost. When we got her back to our vacation cabin, I said, “That must have been scary.” She said, “Yes, it was scary, but I didn’t worry, because I knew you’d come looking for me.”

That’s the Good News of the Gospel, I think. Whenever we get lost, even if it’s in our own brains, in Christ, God comes looking for us.

John Robert McFarland

The title of this column is also the title of one of my favorite Chad Mitchell Trio songs: “One day when I was lost, they nailed him to the cross…”