Searching from aisle to aisle the young mother frantically looked for her child. He was no where to be found, at least by her that is. Half way across their local Wal-mart her son walked with wide eyes trying to find his way through the scary women’s section then the scary craft section. This pint sized explorer wasn’t set on this exploration by his own will; he happened to take a left, when he should have taken a right. His little palms began to drip with sweat, his breaths grew shorter and shorter. Panic and fear began to grip him as he looked for something that might be familiar. He was indeed lost.
This pint sized individual was your’s truly and I remember that day like it was last week. The feeling of “lostness” isn’t the greatest feeling in the world. It was as if I was in another world of its own as I walked through sections that terrified young boys. I think we’ve all been at that place at some point in our lives, that feeling of utter bewilderment. Where the world around us and our sights are so foreign that we don’t know where to turn next or even what to say. It doesn’t matter if it is an 10 year old boy trying to find his mother and somehow taking a right instead of a left and ending up in the women’s “under garment” section or the 23 year old young man stepping off of an airplane in a foreign country for a year and half trying to make it by and tell a few people about Jesus in the process.
I’ve worn both of those hats and let me tell you I’ve stayed clear of the women’s “under garment” section since that first foray. Most recently, I stepped off of the airplane not into the foreign country, well not really. See that year and a half is behind me and I’m back in my so-called “homeland,”but just like when I was that kid lost in Wal-mart or a green American right off the plane in Eastern Europe, I’m right back with that same feeling of not having any idea where I am. I like to refer to it as a perpetual “lostness.”
It seems normal to talk about this perpetual “lostness” as I was trying to grow accustomed to living in the Czech Republic for quite some time. Even as I left I barely had a flimsy grasp of the language which is the key to successfully navigating through any culture. You think it would be a breeze sliding right back into American culture, wouldn’t you? I grew up here, nearly everyone here speaks my language, and I’ve kept up on some of the current cultural shifts while I’ve been gone (however, I still don’t understand the whole poker craze, amongst other culture oddities), but yet I still feel like an outsider, I now feel lost here in the good ole USofA.
The crazy thing about this is that this is how I should feel every day. This is how you should feel every day. It shouldn’t have to take an individual being out of their native culture and reentering it to feel this. You might be wondering, “Why,” at this point. This is why, because “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 3:20) See if your life has been impacted by the person of Jesus and you have entered into a love relationship with Him, then you are an alien, you’re a foreigner, you’re perpetually lost in this world every morning you wake up! There should be an uneasy feeling that you don’t quite fit in, that there is something that you are missing. The reason being is because there is, you aren’t home. You will not be home until our Heavenly Daddy calls you home.
This perpetual “lostness” was more than common to me as I lived over seas the last year and a half, every morning when I’d roll out of my bed to begin my day I wondered how I would negotiate my way through it. See I was in a place where I only understood about 60% of what was being said (and that was on a good day) and what was going down around me. I was perpetually lost and as I return to America I am just as lost. But it is this unsettling feeling that we should have because our true home isn’t here. It’s where the great carpenter is building us a room where we will spend forever living in just the opposite of perpetual “lostness” – everlasting “foundness.” A place where nothing will feel foreign, out of place or confusing because it is the place that we were created for.