ONE DAY WHEN I WAS LOST… [Sat, 1-28-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter. ONE DAY WHEN I WAS LOST… [Sat, 1-28-23]

 

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. Then the tracking-down commences. Helen goes looking for her friend. 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. So, I’ll tell again one of my favorite stories from our own family…

When our daughters were teens, we took a vacation trip out west. We spent a night in the Custer State Park, in South Dakota. Katie and I were long-distance runners, so after supper we went out for a training run. At the time, we lived on the flat prairies of central Illinois. My old legs weren’t used to the hills of the Badlands. After a few miles, I dropped out and went back to our cabin. But Katie was tough. She was the only girl on a 22 member high school cross country team, the only girl ever to win a letter in a boys’ sport in her high school. She kept running.

That was a problem, because of sunset. On the Illinois prairies, the sunset lingers on the horizon for a long time in summer. In the Badlands, when the sun sets, it’s just gone. There one moment, gone the next.

So, Katie got lost. When she was not back at the cabin at the time she said she would be, I got in our car and started driving those winding park roads much too fast, an urgent fear in my heart.

We finally got her back to the cabin, and I tried to be sympathetic to what she must have felt out there in the dark, all by herself, the night sounds coming down from the hills and closer and closer to the road she was running. “It must have been scary out there,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered, “it was, but I wasn’t really worried, because I knew you would come looking for me.”

We just passed the birthday of our late friend, Joe Frazier, the baritone in the wonderful Chad Mitchell Trio of the 1960s. After the trio days, he became an Episcopal priest. I can still hear his voice in the trio, in one of their early recordings: “One day when I was lost, they nailed him to the cross, they nailed him to the cross just for me…”

That’s the main reason, I think, that we call the story of the Christ “good news.” There is no better news than this: because of the Resurrection, Christ—God incarnate, Love incarnate—is always available, any time, any place. Always ready to come looking. Any day when you are lost, in Christ, God comes looking for you.

John Robert McFarland