My favorite thing about lost things is clearly remembering thinking “I’m going to put this (the currently lost thing) right here (wherever in the world that was that you cannot now recall for love nor money) so I can find it next time (and right NOW is “next time”) I need it”.  Yep!  My favorite.  And you can look high and low and never find it.  Or maybe you finally locate it – after an exasperating search during which you’ve lost every bit of religion you ever thought you had.  Or maybe you find it days later, long after you really needed it.  Or maybe you find it years later – you run across the lost thing and think “Damn! Here’s that thing I was looking for way back when.”

Lost things can be any number of things – from important papers, jewelry, credit cards, pictures, tools, books…………but sometimes people get lost too.  How does that happen?  I’ve lost a few over the years.  I didn’t mean to lose them.  I guess it’s more like they just slipped away.  Their face or a memory of them floats across your mind and you wonder where they are and what happened to them.  Sometimes it’s been such a long time and so far away that there’s no way to even know where to begin the search to find them.  Sometimes they are from a time so lost itself that it’s probably better that those people are lost and remain so.

I’ve been lost myself on a number of occasions – lost in thought, lost in a really good book.  And there have been times when I’ve lost my way – figuratively and literally.  Sigh…. But that is a story for another time.

And there are lost souls too.  Or at least that’s what we call them.  My Uncle Jack was one of those.  My grampa said on his dying bed to my daddy:  “I know you think I didn’t treat you right sometimes – that I seemed to favor Jack.  But that wasn’t it.  I was just trying to bring that lost sheep back into the fold.”  It broke my daddy’s heart to think of his own daddy’s deep regret in losing his son.  And that story broke my heart too.  And sad as I am for both my grampa and my daddy I am sadder still for my Uncle Jack.  Well, that is if his soul is really lost.  But somehow I don’t think it is.  I think you can lose a lot of things but I don’t think you can lose your soul.  I think God has put them in that place where we just can’t quite remember where they are but they show up in the end.