Securing the lost: God wants us with him

	Word to Life  Jean Denton

I rummaged through closets and drawers trying to make as little noise as possible because I knew I was indulging in obsessive behavior. But my grown son, visiting from out of town, heard me.

"Mom!" he called from downstairs. I heard the familiar mix of amusement and mild irritation in his voice. "Are you still looking for my sunglasses? Stop. I'm just going to get another pair."

Really, I know I have this obsession - spending way too long and hard looking for lost things. Maybe it's that son's fault. My memory is etched with the experience of a week when he, as an infant, lost his pacifier - the one and only that would, well, pacify him. It was "The Longest Week" as we tried numerous replacements to no avail and much wailing. Somehow we all survived, but I think it left me a little weird about going out of my way to find lost things.

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007) Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14 Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 17, 19 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-32

However, that primal need for security is in all of us. It's not so surprising that we constantly search for the ultimate security of being loved. The God of love placed that desire in us, reflective of his own desire for our love.

The Gospel parable of the lost coin could just as easily be for me the parable of the sunglasses. It tells me that just as I am irrationally driven to find this lost item, God can't help but go out of his way to try to retrieve even one lost soul. In the vast eyes of God, not one of us can be replaced - so his desire and his effort to bring back the lost cannot be dissuaded.

Completing the parable of the sunglasses, imagine them falling from a car's roof onto the street where they are smashed under the wheels of a van, then swept into a storm drain. Then imagine obsessive me finding one intact lens and following a trail of plastic bits into the storm drain and picking through the mud to find every last piece and miraculously (this would be me being God) restoring them to their original condition of infinite coolness, the basic quality of sunglasses.

	Reflection question • What experiences of loss speak to you about the joy of reunion with a loved one?

That's a distant approximation of God's desire to have us always with him.

This column is offered in cooperation with the North Texas Catholic of Fort Worth, Texas.