A routine anchors us in life, but sometimes the problem is that it anchors us in life. Keeps us from those wide swaths of life where things are unpredictable. Where things get lost. Once in a while we need to get lost.

Elijah the prophet is lost. Alone, isolated, without friends or support. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel have the army out trying to hunt down Elijah – and they mean to do him harm, to take his life. Elijah is lost and on the edge of gone – and he encounters God.

St Paul, the author of our 2^nd reading is about to get lost – and he doesn’t even know it. He is heading to Rome, a place he has never been, to be with a community he does not know – and he will go there in chains. He is too lost to know he is lost. And still, he trusts God.

Think about the Israelite people during their wilderness Exodus – they got way lost; 40 years worth of lost. They were being taken to school and they didn’t even know the lesson God was teaching – that’s how lost they were. Such are some days learning the holy art of being lost.

Sometimes lost happens in the wink of an eye – one moment life is good, you are on top of the world, you are walking on water, and the next moment the consequences of your choices have you sinking in the churning abyss of chaos. There is a little of St Peter in each one of us: impulse leading to implosion. Boom!! The wink of an eye and we are drowning. St Peter cried out “Lord, save me.” Down, drenched and doubting, Jesus pulled Peter to safety. But notice he didn’t fix Peter’s doubt or give him more faith – he just let Peter know he was not alone. Back in the boat he believed, he worshipped, he trusted in a new deeper way.

Sometimes lost happens slowly, imperceptibly, a long slow slide into “how did I get here?” A life you did not plan but nonetheless have, a life a though a garden untended, a life that slipped by, and you wake up wondering “when did this happen?”  How, when, whatever…lost can happen. We are suddenly awake and feel we need to find God. God isn’t the one who is lost.

Be it a long slow slide or in the wink of an eye, the thing about being lost – assuming you survive – is that it can be the great teacher. Elijah, Paul and Peter learned lessons from being lost. Lost can also lead you to the place where you experience a depth of trust you did not know you possessed; it can open up the gratitude locked deep within your heart. It can teach you how to say “thank you” in a way that resonates to the bones within.

But there’s the advanced level of lost – something we don’t choose, but happens to us: failure, loss, grief, abandonment. Suddenly we are in unfamiliar territory where our GPS, our maps and directions are useless.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, knew that kind of being lost. She was not raised in any faith, and frankly had a romance with atheism. At the birth of her daughter Tamar, she was moved by the miracle of life. Holding her infant daughter, she was so overcome with awe and gratitude that she broke into spontaneous prayer – she discovered she needed to thank someone. It from this point that she began to explore Catholicism, entered the faith, had her child baptized – and that is when all her former friends abandoned her. Lost – no other way to describe it. She found herself in prayer, lost and abandoned, crying out to God that he rescue her and lead her to a new life in Christ. Dorothy Day learned what it meant to kneel at the Altar of the Lost – to kneel where so many saints and sinners alike have knelt. Dorothy Day learned what God wanted of her and she dedicated her life to the lost and abandoned.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr had moved to Montgomery, to the van guard of the Civil Rights movement and the boycott of the city bus system. It is one thing to walk into the wilderness where lost is an everyday reality – it is another to lead you family there. Late one night a single phone call that threatened the life of his wife and children hurled Dr King deep into lost. In his book, Stride Toward Freedom, he describes that night of worry, agitation and confusion, until he finally called out to God: ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. …I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ Then he heard that still, small voice of God and the overwhelming presence of the Divine. He stepped onto the path God chose for him, no longer lost, even though he would lose his life.

There are three kinds of people: those that have been lost, the lost, and those who will be lost. Maybe at different time in our lives we will experience all these things. There was a time when I was unanchored, adrift in the uncharted water of mission in Kenya. Like Jesus, the mission service sent us out two-by-two, but my mission partner quickly feel under the sway of the diseases of East Africa: malaria, typhoid, and then we stopped keeping count. He had to go home within the first four months. Our original mission site lost its funding and they said “Sorry, can’t help you” So there I am: not yet able to speak Kiswahili, don’t know anyone, phones did not work – if you could even find one. Email was not an option in those days. Snail mail took about 8 weeks round trip. All that was within the first three months. I felt beyond lost, somewhere near the edge of vanished.

There were two basic choices: (Plan A) credit card + passport = one-way trip home or (Plan B) kneel at the altar of the lost, willing to pray, willing to be open to the “tiny, whispering sound” that Elijah encountered, willing to endure so-lost you don’t know how lost you are like St Paul, to cry out like St Peter, to wander for 40 years in the wilderness if that’s what it takes, or maybe like Dr. King to know you have nothing left – only empty hands. Hands that God can fill, hands that God can grasp – all beginning in the folded hands of prayer. I took a breath, chose Plan B and got saved, got found, and even though I was living in a slum in Africa, half a world from every anchor of the life I had known, I was no longer lost. I heard the still small voice, felt the hand pull me from the edge of vanished, and got back in the boat – still out on the waters, no longer lost, but finally grateful. Finally seeing the holiness of that place, there on the other side of the world, on the other side of lost.

Trust me, I am not rushing out to be lost again, but lost is the place where you learn to trust, where you learn gratitude, and where you learn you are never alone, no matter how lost you are. Lost is a holy place to encounter God who loves us without measure.

Life is filled with wide swaths of life where things are unpredictable. Where things get lost. All different kinds of lost. Once in a while we will end up lost: alone in the cave, heading in a direction not of our choosing, or sinking into the storm of life. Know that even there you are in a holy place.

A holy place where God finds what was lost. God finds you.

Amen