Something’s been bothering me for ages, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Or maybe I just avoided it because I thought it was a stupid question. But now, with help from an honest and wonderful friend (not the kind you can have hundreds of on farcebook – no offence to all you wonderful friends on facebook, of course!), it’s staring me in the face and refusing to politely disappear so I can go on my merry way (as I do, you know). And this disconcerting dilemma is … Why does God, in the space of one chapter (Luke 15), choose to pursue a lost sheep, search high and low for a lost coin and then sit around on the front porch just waiting for a lost son? No search parties, no “bring ‘em back alive” quests, not even any pleading letters, he just waits. And yet just a few verses beforehand he would leave almost everything to find the one who was lost, or leave no stone unturned until they were found.
I guess if I was a lost sheep, stuck, hungry, cold, etc. I’d be pretty pleased to be found. Imagining life as a lost coin may be more of a stretch, but I’d be totally dependent on my owner looking for me, and doubtless glad to be returned to the company of my valued companions before becoming Dyson-fodder. But, I suspect if my Dad gate-crashed one of my wild parties, I’d have felt embarrassed by him, and if he turned up at the pig farm my pride and shame would have made me hide from him.
Sometimes (perhaps more often than I like to think) God and his people (including me) need to pursue wholeheartedly and search endlessly for those who are lost. But sometimes, when we (including me) choose to go on our own way (no longer remaining?) the only thing God (and perhaps his people) can do is to wait, watching the horizon, hoping, praying and having already forgiven. I trust that God knows his children and knows what to do and that if we listen to him he’ll tell us too.
