The Lost and the Song

Realizing that you've lost something can happen in one of two ways: in a single, terrible instant, or with slow, dawning comprehension. Last week, it was the latter. As I left Tuesday night prayer, I grasped my right pocket. And then the left. And then I seized all of my pockets. Empty. My keys and my Navy lanyard were gone. For my friends, the remainder of the trip was much like conversing with an agitated mother. No conversation swayed me from anxiously clucking about where my keys were, whether they were safe, and who would listen now when I tell them that I used to be a Navy vet. But that wasn't what unsettled me most.

All that time, my keys had been sitting expectantly on the gym floor, right where I left them. As I galloped home, unleashing the "hallelujah" chorus into the night sky, I was struck sidelong by how small the joy of my salvation seemed in comparison to this unfeigned, boundless euphoria. Job once lamented his overwhelming awareness of God's unbearable gaze: What is man that You magnify him and that You are concerned about him, that You examine him every morning and try him every moment? Will You never turn Your gaze from me...? I felt afflicted with the opposite. I thought about how every morning I awoke feeling lost and frustrated, wondering where God and all the fanfare that used to accompany Him had gone. Somewhere along the way, I had become so dully attuned to His grace that I had lost much more than my keys.

But within a span of a hundred yards, my heart had turned again. By the time I triumphantly sprinted up the stairs and fit my key in the lock, my roommate jumping up from the sofa in anticipation, I was convinced that more than one thing had been found that night. God rescue not only my keys, but also my soul from despair. What better a way to assure me that He was near, and had never left, than to choose the most unassuming of ways to declare His adamant presence in all of my affairs? Could an event of such laughable simplicity really have such cosmic consequences? How foolish and silly it all seemed! Many things, such as our relationships, ailments, and careers we offer up in desperate prayer, but others we either deem manageable, or have difficulty seeing any room for God's involvement. As a result, we live tunelessly for entire intervals in which He seems both absent and irrelevant.

We will never cease to be fixated by the infinite ascent and descent of questions and answers that run along the very foundations of creation. One moment, He might move mightily like a rushing squall, altering history and shifting whole landscapes, and in the next, work with the careful precision of a watchmaker, multiplying the tiniest of moments into praise and wonderment. He makes our paths straight, and yet ambushes us with side-journeys to remind us that He loves us, and that we should trust Him daily. To those who might try to walk life in a straight line, beware of an unpredictable God who works all things great and small for the good of our salvation. A trip, a stumble off the path, a lost set of keys, and you may unexpectedly find yourself face to face with the same sovereign and majestic God that Moses did while tending to Jethro's flock in the parched and unpredictable wild.