Musings From The Second Half of Life

Have you ever been driving down the road thinking about others things and then suddenly come back to reality and realize that you are lost? I did that several times yesterday. My brain was on auto-pilot for several reasons I won’t go into here. I will say the phone rang and it began to bring me back to awareness. I took the phone call, hung up, thought about the call for a while longer, driving several minutes before I came to realize that I was actually driving and had a purpose in the car!!! I was driving to a work appointment. I struggled to think of who I was going to see, where it was and how was I suppose to be getting there. It is a panicky kind of feeling. After a minute or two, I pulled over into a parking lot, pulled out my daytimer, then re-located my directions that had fallen to the floor. I was able to determine what street I had just pulled away from and back tracked to where I was supposed to be in the first place. It cost me 20 minutes. I am told that this is a mid-life thing that happens to people all of the time. It is both confusing and frustrating. Later in the day, this experience came back to me.

I read an article that defined the Greek word for “lost” as written in the Bible. The word for misplaced and lost is the same in Greek. How interesting! In the story about Zaccheus, he had heard a lot about Jesus and wanted to get a look at him. He stopped what he was doing and found a perch to get a visual. He wasn’t where people usually go. Jesus noticed him in the sycamore tree because he was misplaced. Birds hung out where Zach was, not people.

The scene struck me in light of my adventure in UN-awareness earlier in the day. I want to carry it a bit further here.

I once read one of George Orwell’s essays a description of a graphic image of human lostness. Orwell describes a wasp that “was sucking jam on my plate and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.”

The wasp and people without Christ have much in common. Severed from their souls, but greedy and unaware, people continue to consume life’s sweetness. Only when it’s time to fly away will they gasp their dreadful condition.

I think of my life as a whole and wonder if I am “misplaced” sometimes. Are there times I lose sight of my goal, forget where I am going, get off track, start heading somewhere else? Will I notice before I start to try to fly again? Will someone help me out of my bird cage or will they chop me in half when I make a wrong turn? Or will they just sit back and watch me flail about until I have made a grand mess of my situation?

What do I do when I see people who are misplaced? When do I step in? Is it when I see them eyeballing the jam from their perch in the tree? OR, is it when the bad choice chops them in half? What I do? What SHOULD I do?

If we are to live like Jesus, are we noticing the people who are in trees as we journey? If we look at these people in their own cuckoo nest as misplaced instead of as lost in the traditional sense, it makes it easier to understand how we can help them get back onto the right track, the road they were meant and created to follow, the purpose God has for their lives.