To Find What We Have Lost
“Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”
Matthew 11:28
If we come to a church ‘right,’ we come to it more fully and completely ourselves, and we come with more of our humanness showing than when we are at any other place.
We come like Moses with muck on our shoes, foot-sore and travel-stained with the dust of our lives upon us: our failures, our defeats, our deceits, our hypocrisies. Because even if, unlike Moses, we have never taken anybody’s life, we have again and again withheld from other people the love that might have made their lives worth living, not to mention our own. Often, this is true of those to whom we are closest.
Like Moses, we come here as we are and, like him, we come as strangers and exiles in our own way; because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost.
Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name, something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs. We come to church to find what we have lost. We come here to acknowledge that, in terms of the best we could be, we are lost and helpless to save ourselves. We come here to confess our sins. We come to be forgiven, to be renewed, to be born again, to be restored, to remember who we are and whose we are.
See you in Church!
