Sometimes it feels like I found Jesus almost by accident. If I had been one of the magi who followed the star to find Jesus, I think I would have gotten lost. I’m pretty good at getting lost in most places, and I’m also an expert in doing things the wrong way, the long way, or in a different order than things are supposed to be. The worst part of it is, I can drive to a place on a regular basis and still hvae it take months to remember how to get there. One day it dawned on me that I don’t get lost once I’ve made connections.
I moved to my current city four years ago. Three of my children were in middle school, and one was in the elementary school (that’s because in my school district, middle school starts in fourth grade). I knew how to get to the middle school almost immediately, as my disabled child was in that school and I was being called to the school constantly. It was also something that I was able to connect to another location that I knew, and also to my apartment. It wasn’t until my youngest daughter had been in elementary school for more than a year before I finally remembered how to get there. I had finally connected it with something.
Without connections to things, I’m lost. So if I were following the star, but unable to connect it to something else, I would more than likely have gotten lost. The wise men had been looking for the star, probably for many, many, years by that point. I reckon there might have been some excitement there, the star actually did appear one day and they were ready. It was the trip of a lifetime.
I too was looking for the star, I just didn’t know it. It feels more like I found Jesus because I was following something else on my way to a totally different location, wound up lost and bam, there was Jesus. I had looked for Jesus for many years, and when I didn’t find him, I went and looked for other gods and passions, but I guess Jesus knew I was looking for him and I stumbled across him on my way somewhere else at which point it didn’t make any sense to keep going the direction I had intended to, and I started to follow Jesus around. I wasn’t very good at it and I still got lost a whole hell of a lot but Jesus always comes to get me.
These are my thoughts during Epiphanytide, or Ordinary Time, that relate to Epiphany. It’s a story about being lost and being found, and apparently the joke about men never asking for directions wasn’t true of the wise men, but I had asked directions many times and still never figured out how to get there until quite by accident, I came face to face with Jesus.
formed by prayer 