16
Lost Girl

I wanted to be found as fast as humanly possible. This was my game plan in early 2011:

1. Apply to work at Starbucks.
2. Continue playing Addison Road shows (with hired musicians) until all contracts are fulfilled. Until I can acknowledge there is no Addison Road anymore.
3. Apply to grad school. Become the diplomat I have always dreamed of becoming.
4. Check graduate school sticker price. Decide grad school is a no-go.
5. Contemplate working on a church staff. Break out in hives.
6. Reapply to Starbucks.
7. Make glittery craft projects with my two-year-old.
8. Cry over my complete state of lostness.
9. Repeat.

Had it been up to me, I would have become a lifelong barista. Not because I dreamed of pulling the perfect espresso shot, but because it was an answer. And sometimes, desperate people will take a wrong answer over no answer at all. But that really isn’t the answer either, is it? During the spring of 2011, when I could often turn on the radio and hear an Addison Road song—my own voice playing over syndicated airwaves for a million people—I was considering applying to work at Starbucks. It was a shortsighted rebound for a lost girl uncomfortable with having no answers or immediate direction in her life.

I dreaded looking at a blank calendar; I hadn’t seen a blank month on the calendar in over a decade. My role as Annie’s mom was not lost on me. We played hard, took daily walks to the library, made craft projects, and lay in the grass counting clouds and catching bugs. I loved every moment (well, almost every moment) of being a full-time mom. But I knew for me, mothering was only a part of who I was and what I was supposed to be about.

Busyness for the sake of busyness was not my goal; it was purpose I was seeking. But a new, noble purpose didn’t come right away. “God, please open a new door. Please show me what comes next. Pleeeaaase.” I begged and pleaded like a child. But the lack of answers and blank calendar dates kept staring me in the face. The whole world seemed to say, “What’s the hurry?” As if sitting in the lostness might be good for me. My favorite author, Robert Benson, says, “Be not afraid to wander and wonder along. Do not fear trying to find your way and, from time to time, being lost along that same way. If you will be patient—and patience is not a virtue in these matters—but a necessity—a sentence or two will be given to you.”1

I was neither virtuous nor interested in patience. A sentence or two sounded like pure torture. And being lost along the way was definitely not taught in school or church. Self-reliance, fully mapped-out futures, and divine epiphanies, these were the things that young adults should strive for—not lostness. Accepting lostness as a viable way of existing, even for a short season, is not a mantra our culture is familiar with. It certainly sounded backwards to a girl who was desperate to move forward. Yet time and time again the same message arrived at the door of my heart. Just be lost for a while. My husband, parents, pastors, friends, therapist, random books I picked up to read, even songs I heard for the first time, all echoed the same sentiment. Lean in to the lostness. Don’t find your way out too soon. Riches hidden in secret places. Treasures in the darkness. Stay. Find them. Be lost. So many voices were reaching a fever pitch and the exhaustion from trying to un-lost myself was evident—so one morning, I gave in.

It was time to embrace being a lost girl.

Time to accept the seemingly insignificant nothingness of the blank page in front of me.

Want to unnerve someone? Make peace with your lostness. When they ask, “What do you do?” respond like this: “Well, I wake up and take a shower, sometimes. Then I look in the mirror and remind myself that I have no job, no future plans, and no 401(k) account. I tell myself this is exactly where I am supposed to be right now and I contend to do absolutely nothing about it because I have decided to be lost for a season. Then I usually go eat a bowl of cereal and watch The Today Show. So—I just do lostness. What about you? What do you do?”

They will be horrified! Horrified! It is quite entertaining to watch. I once told this from the stage to a group of young, twenty-something Christian adults. They looked at me with disgusted shock. Their glares told me everything I needed to know about our culturally engrained idols of productivity and purpose. How irresponsible! What a waste! She’s gone off the deep end! Pity and judgment oozed out of them as they looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was one of those people who lives off of the government instead of my own two hands! I instantly felt the weight of our generation’s disdain for lost people. And I smiled. Maybe I was doing the right thing after all.

Did it ever cross their minds, I wondered, that perhaps my lostness was part of a spiritual journey that God Himself had invited me into? That the abundance of pity they felt for me could have just as easily been given to those in the room working jobs they hated, for companies they didn’t believe in, simply to avoid being lost?

Lostness is just a season, I told them.

“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. . . . A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away.”2

Lostness is a season, says the writer of Ecclesiastes.

We would rather focus on the other seasons in Ecclesiastes 3, like planting, building up, and harvesting, while disregarding the less attractive ones like quitting, dying, and throwing away. Our basic instinct tells us to hold on, not let go. Perhaps that is why we have become a culture of doers who would just as soon accept a wrong answer than quit searching and inhabit lostness for a time. How irresponsible! But is it?

Making peace with my lost state in life happened in small ways. Refusing to apply for a job at Starbucks—a job I knew wasn’t meant for me. Shutting down the calendar and not looking at blank days as shame-driven motivation to just move on already. Learning to quiet the frantic voice in my soul that kept telling me THE WHOLE WORLD WOULD END if I did not figure out what came next. Replacing that voice instead with a simple prayer: You alone are a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And relearning how to tell the truth to others and myself. This was hard since most people expect you to lie. When asked how life is going or what the plans for your future look like, no one expects the person answering to say, “Actually, my future looks really bleak right now and I have no idea what comes next and I am a bit scared.” This kind of vulnerable honesty terrifies people. Especially Christians. What type of good Christian doesn’t have a Jesus answer readily available? A genuine response about faith, hope, and being more than a conqueror—and a pretty bow to wrap it all up in? I got the sense from many believers that in their opinion, I was a woman of little faith. Somehow my sitting in the dark reflected poorly on my faith in God.

But I think it is the other way around. A person who is willing to inhabit their lostness has the faith of a great army. People who don’t have faith don’t allow themselves to get lost. They do not trust God to show up in the darkness and shine a light on the path that leads to being found. A faithless person holds on because they cannot control what happens when they let go. They are unwilling to follow anyone into the dark.

Wendell Berry says it best: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”3

As a person of deep faith who believes I have a good Guide who delivers lost people to found places, I no longer go the wrong way just to avoid impeded streams. Impeded streams bring me face-to-face with God. That is where the real spiritual journey begins.

I think back to those years after my dad graduated from seminary and couldn’t find the type of job he had trained for and felt called to. Instead, he was a security guard splitting his time between a hospital and a halfway house for the mentally ill, and supplementing those jobs by bagging newspapers in the basement of a building long before the sun came up.

And I think about myself, of course. At home for the first time in years. Every. Single. Day. No constant community. No idea how to raise Annie by myself. So lonely I begin to talk to myself out loud in a creepy kind of way. Compulsively binging on glitter and craft supplies. No job. No concept of who I was or what I was supposed to do. No road in front of me, and not able to see anything on the horizon.

The thing is, when you are alone in a house changing diapers all day or working in a basement before the moon gives way to dawn, it’s hard to know the sun is rising. Without morning’s first hazy beams of light shining in those dark, unknown places, it is hard to trust that there is anything good on the horizon. And yet as a person of faith I am invited to live in the tension of believing that God is present and at work, whether I see immediate evidence of it or not. I am invited to abide in the truth that the sun is still rising. Always rising. Whether I see it yet or not, there’s a little bit of morning outside.

God sees what I cannot. He leads where there is no discernible road. He Himself is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Here at my impeded stream, after the dying and burying, I make a crucial decision to allow the season of lostness into my life. And I put the onus on God to un-lost me.

I get the feeling He has been waiting for me to do this all along.

It is my greatest act of faith to trust God to un-lost me. My greatest act of trust to follow the One who sees the sunrise when I cannot.