It scared me…looking at that little kid. He was no more than three years old, screaming and crying at the top of his lungs in the middle of the aisle at Walmart a couple weeks ago. I had gone in to buy a year’s worth of soap and shampoo (as old men do this time of year) and as I turned into aisle three I spotted him, all alone, a quivering mass of tremulous panic and primal scream. He was lost. Lost and alone.
Lost like the old lady whose family abandoned her, so she ended up in a ramshackle nursing home in the North End of Springfield. And while that aid from Ghana is nice to her, most of the time she just sits in her urine-soaked wheelchair and cries softly, struggling through a cloud of dementia to remember a time when someone loved her enough to smile at her. She’ll be alone this Christmas. She’s lost.
And then there’s the kid at B.C. who just a few months ago thrilled at the idea of being in College, at the freedom to hook up or drop into a rager and then tweet selfies to all his friends. He’s even tried other stuff and while it all felt great at the time, no one really texts him back anymore and he’s not sure they ever will…ever. He’s alone today. He’s lost.
Lost as the the guy who the day after he told his wife about that thing he did, watched her walk out the door with the kids in tow, or the fellow who got laid off last week before he could even buy Christmas gifts for the kids, or the old man sitting in his car and just staring at the steering wheel after hearing it was stage four cancer, or the old woman who has just buried her husband of fifty years, who can’t stop sobbing as she walks from the grave. Lost. All lost. Living in a desperate diaspora of hopelessness and convinced it will never end.
And then along comes Jeremiah, the Prophet, peering down the alley-ways and tunnels of our souls and shouting to us: Behold, the days are coming, when God will lead you out of dark despair from hopelessness to his inestimable light. Out of mourning and weeping and shame to his endless, boundless love.
For the Virgin will bear a Son, and they shall name him “God is with us,” and he will lead us home, and we will never ever be lost again.
