I can tell you that God has repeatedly ‘raised me up’ in the middle of the innumerable situations where ‘up’ had become a hope lost in the darkness of the places to which I had fallen. And while that is the miracle of my story, it sits waiting to be the reality of yours.

Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.

If we were to tally all of the potential that was never unleashed throughout the history of mankind, and if that tally was somehow held up in front of us, I would hope against all hope that it would horrify us to a point of such despair that we would be driven to insure that such a tragedy would never be given any shred of space anywhere in our own lives nor in the lives of any life that we might touch for the rest of our lives.

We can wander into a wilderness so vast and entangled that it will consume us or we can plummet to depths dark beyond dark, only to discover that God was sitting there waiting for us before we ever started wandering or falling.

Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?

It seems that the need to ‘found’ is offset by the fear that we will be exposed in the finding. And in looking at our world, I sometimes wonder if that fear drives some sort of twisted intentionality about being ‘lost’ that will eventually eliminate any possibility of us ever being ‘found?

God has given me both the right and privilege to outrun Him if I so choose. Yet, if I do so, I will have lost the race.

A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.

If I’m walking with God, not knowing where I’m at has absolutely nothing to do with being lost.