Losing Things

I lose things all the time
One of the worst things ever, is to lose your keys

Always happens when you’re running late

Natalie put in a key holder near the entrance to the door, saves my bacon more days than I’d care to admit.
Feeling when lost things are found?

Fantastic, isn’t it?

Lostness

Today we’re going to talk a lot about being lost.
Sometimes we think that the lost people are the skid row bums and the prostitutes and the ilk

And they’re lost
But sometimes, so are we

Today, we get the story of not One but TWO lost brothers

Only one of them gets found though.

Read the Passage

Story – The Far Country

Randy didn’t want to find himself lost
He started life like any kid but, according to him, he got full of himself

Then he got into drugs

Next thing you know, Randy robbed three convenience stores with a gun and is sentenced to 12 years in the penitentiary.
I met him doing Kairos
He talks so powerfully about being lost but what’s interesting is if you take the details out of it, the emotions he describes, well, we all understand

You may never have been strung out on drugs or robbing stores, but if you’ve lived a few years on this side of eternity, you know exactly what it’s like to feel lost

IT’s a feeling that nobody is watching and that worse, nobody cares
It’s feeling that because nobody is watching and that nobody cares, you can do whatever you want

Seems like it’ll be freeing

No morality
No ethics
No rules

But living that way? It only amplifies your loneliness as life becomes a collection of hangers on and half-hearted friends who can’t be counted on. 

In that self-manufactured isolation from others as well as God, we become inclined to selfishness

The selfishness is what dooms us.

Every one of us travels to the far country on occasion

Where is the Far country?

I always think of it as being Vegas

After all, there’s sin aplenty to be found there!

Everything the younger brother was after

Sex, gambling, the bright lights of the big city.

But it doesn’t have to be Vegas

It Could be North Carolina, it could be Charlotte, heck, the far country can and is on occasion no further away from us than Coulwood.

The fact of the matter is the far country is wherever we are when we’re travelling without God.

That’s what the Younger Brother wanted to do. He KNEW IT AND EVEN TOLD HIS DAD.