PARK PLACE OF ST. JOHN Life Style
Chaplain’s Corner Found?
a wealthy person. So the loss of one sheep would seem somewhat insignificant. But Jesus said the shepherd fervently loved his sheep. Given the countryside, it may have been an exhausting search. Perhaps he was losing hope as time passed. But then, he spotted that lost sheep. He rushed over the terrain to reach that sheep. Sweeping it up in his arms and like most shepherds, throwing it around his shoulders, he began his trek back to the 99. Gathering them all up and arriving back home, Jesus said he called together all his friends and neighbors and threw a party! Jesus ended His parable with a supernatural surprise. He said that when a lost person is found, the angels throw a party. The parable’s poignant point was clear. No person is unimportant. No one is forgotten. No one is beyond hope. No one is carelessly cast aside. It doesn’t matter what they look like, whether they are wealthy or poor, whether they are impeccably moral or grossly corrupt, winners or losers. There are no barriers with God. Each person is cherished whether they know it or not. We just honored Good Friday and celebrated Easter. Those holy days echo the heart of God. On Good Friday, God’s Son died on a cross, carrying the failures and brokenness of every human. In a sense, God “lost” His Son. On Easter, the Son was “found.” Jesus had told the parable of the lost sheep to people who were lost from God, some that didn’t even know they were lost, disconnected
I lost my son. He was 5 years old. My heartbreak and brokenness were overwhelming. My wife’s anger was fierce. She had left me with him, and it was my responsibility to keep
him safe. Now what? I could not fathom the future. How could I go on living? I was terrified for him. I was terrified for my wife and all my relations. How would the grandparents react? What about all the rest? Would they now reject me? Would my friends forsake me? What about God? After all, I was one of His “sheep.” And now I had lost one of His lambs. I thought of all the countless parents who had lost a child. Until now, I could not truly know what their pain was like. But now I knew the full brunt of it. We were in a mall in Detroit on a family vacation. So we called on the Mall Security forces. They scrambled everywhere. My wife and I ran all over the mall, and in all the outside parking lots. But our son was gone. The hour that had gone by seemed like days. Our hopes faded with each ticking minute. In one of His most famous parables, Jesus told a story about a shepherd who had lost a sheep. He had 100, but he left the 99 on a hillside to comb the hilly terrain for that one lost sheep. If you owned 100 sheep in Jesus’ day, you were
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