Lost & found

What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went stray? (Matthew 18:12)

It was the day my son was to audition at the Eastman School of Music. We stopped at a shopping mall to pick up something and kill a bit of time until the appointed hour.

At one point, Aaron went one direction; I went another, and somehow ... over 45 minutes or so ... I lost track of him. I walked the mall once, twice, three time or more with a growing sense of panic that something had happened to him in this place and city unknown to us, just as he was to embark on an adventure of great beauty and meaning for which I had prayed since the earliest days of his life.

Nothing unusual about this. I was just being a father, and my anxious emotions and fearful thoughts were exactly those of mothers and fathers since the dawn of time.

In such moments, the heart learns just how greatly it is possible to love. Gripped by a fear only love can create, we become what are, who we are, a little bit more than we usually are.

For each us, from the greatest to the least, the best to the worst, is an image of the Love in whose likeness we are fashioned, the Love who searches for the beloved.

And if we lose track of that, which we do all-too-often, this blessed season bears us into the mystery of God in whose image we are made. For in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Divine Majesty puts on flesh and reveals the Love who seeks us in all the places and all the ways we get lost, lest we forget exactly how precious we are.

David L. Miller