Lost and Found

In a foreign land for the first time, navigating a non-English speaking country, our son got lost the day he arrived. He wandered the city four times before finding his overnight hostel. His adventures continued the next day when he used his phone to translate a sign that warned of explosives nearby; he turned around. Then later, on a coastal hike (in his words) he “nearly got dive bombed” by hundreds of territorial birds. Although it seemed he was a bit shaken up, I was secretly cheering that…1. I didn’t know about these adventures until after he was safe, and 2. He experienced being lost and found. Only through being lost has my faith grown. And I continue to transform by challenging myself to embrace those uncomfortable times.

The Wanderer learns to look deeply into the face of her aloneness and discover what truly brings her alive and what doesn’t. . . . You discover ease, inspiration, belonging, and wisdom in your own company. . . . When wandering, there is immense value in “finding ourselves lost” because we can find something when we are lost, we can find our selves. . . . Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Surrendering fully to being lost, you will discover that, in addition to not knowing how to get where you had wanted to go, you are no longer so sure of the ultimate rightness of that goal. By trusting your unknowing, your old standards of progress dissolve and you become eligible to be chosen by new, larger standards, those that come not from your mind or old story or other people, but from the depths of your soul. You become attentive to an utterly new guidance system. . . . This kind of being lost and then found is one form of ego death and rebirth, one form of entering the tomb-womb of the cocoon. . . . In order to live your soul into the world, you must continuously loosen your beliefs about who you are. ~ Richard Rohr

This Sunday we walk our handcrafted labyrinth for the first time. The labyrinth is a single path that facilitates the spiritual wisdom of losing self to find self. It takes you inward and outward as you walk. In this way one embodies their prayer of being in relationship with oneself, others and God. The path is walked slowly, contemplatively as a spiritual exercise of bringing mind, body, heart and soul into harmony with God.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. – Matthew 16:25