Losing God
Sometimes I lose God.
When I was a child, I experienced the same scary experience that most of us have experienced: losing a parent. Though I know it happened many times, I remember one store in particular. It was a huge clothing outlet store in central Alabama. I was probably 8 years old, and my parents had come here to waste hours poring over things that were only a tiny bit cheaper than they could be gotten elsewhere. There were no toy stores in this outlet mall. Sadly the only store that caught my attention was a Black & Decker outlet… and drastically reduced metric crescent wrenches are only interesting to an eight-year-old for so long.
On one of these trips, I whiled away the time by letting my imagination roam free. It only seemed I was weaving through the racks where my mother was browsing – actually, I was weaving through the rain forest, looking for a tiger. As I let my reality catch up with my imagination, I stopped and looked around… and experienced that sudden sense of panic we all remember from some time in our lives. I had lost her. I looked in every direction for my mother, still not panicked enough to call out her name. I quickly backtracked, went to the places I knew she’d been. She wasn’t there. I kept looking, and now my fear had caught up with me – I began to cry.
It seemed like an eternity, but it was probably only a minute or two. When I found her, I expected her to be anxiously searching for me as well. But she turned from examining a blouse or something, looked down at me, and asked why I was crying. Didn’t she know? Hadn’t we been lost? Wasn’t she as panic-stricken as me? Wasn’t she bursting with joy to know we’d found each other at last?
No. In fact, she’d known where I was the whole time. She’d watched me from over the top of the clothing racks, wondering why I was weaving so erratically through the store. Turns out that if I’d simply stopped and taken time to look, I would have seen her watching me, waiting for me to come back.
Sometimes I lose God. Like when I lose my sunglasses, only to find they’ve been on my head the whole time. Like when I got lost in the city, trying to get back to my skyscraper hotel – even though I never lost sight of it, I couldn’t quite figure out how to get back there.
Sometimes I lose God. But I’m never lost. And I’m always glad to be found.
