I lost track

“Uh oh, I lost track,” Adam murmurs, when suddenly I press the brake a little too hard and the car lurches, at the exact moment when also I resentfully glare at the massive dump truck lumbering and grunting just ahead, when secretly I tuck a selfish, incredulous why into a shadowy part of my heart.

Uh oh is right, because my first thought isn’t that I’ve lost track but that the truck has, because Mater up there is in my way—my way! –and going nowhere fast.

Then, on second thought, maybe I have lost track, because why do I have to be here, threading through this traffic?  Why does life have to be so much all the time?

My thumb beats against the steering wheel.

In truth, I’ve felt sullen all morning, emptied and hungry, barren and nearly stretched to ruin, as though, during the bright, sad season of Lent, I’ve been fasting alone in the desert, as though I’ve wandered off into a wilderness.  I’m off track, but not in the way I at first believed, because deep in the hinterland, I get dis-oriented and find myself in need of a good turn.

On track, off track, it all seems to be about location, at least when I think about the words, and it can be hard to believe the wilderness could ever be along the Way in which a good God leads.  Even so, that is the more accurate way to describe what brought Christ to the place of temptation, what, years and years prior, had happened to the Israelites.  God led them into wild places, and He leads me here.

All week, in fact, God has led me through what feel to me like dry and tumbling spaces, and has spoken to me in traffic snarls, when I have been caught up in myself.  Self-consumption is sin, and sin, that word no one likes anymore, means off the mark, or, to borrow Adam’s phrase, off track.

I go off track not once-in-a-while but consistently, and all week, the good shepherd has followed me, errant sheep that I am, into caverns where I have groaned with impatience and grumbled my complaints, and, all the while, has carefully encouraged me to remember it’s not all about me.  He has moved me to slow and know that other lives matter just as much as my own, more, if I want a heart like His.  His words have been like gentle, compassionate taps against my flank, like the firm hook of His protective arm around my middle.

Crawling as we are now behind the dump truck, the other lane unbreakable like a chain, I have time to listen more carefully, time to let God touch my eyes, time to reconsider my attitude, and I can’t help but smile at the accuracy of Adam’s words at just the right time.

Uh oh, I lost track.

He’s right about me, even if the why of it sometimes muddies, and it’s funny to me that in what for me has lately been a training ground for deep confession, those words have become a repetitive, echolalic phrase for my son, a rhythmic collection of sounds that, for him, represent a kind of white noise allowing him to take a cognitive break from what would otherwise be a constant stream of unprioritized sensory information.  In as much as those words have become part of his echolalia, they’ve also become part of the background of our lives.

I’m off track, I admit, the confession a silent prayer as we grind to a halt again behind the dump truck, behind the person driving that truck, the person with a life and people, the person God loves.  I’m off track, but not because the road is clogged and we’re stuck, or because life is hard and inconvenient, or even because I’m uncomfortable.

Truth be told, the barren lands feel off track, because the idea that being on track amounts to comfort and productivity, influence and affluence, thrums so loudly through the hidden veins of this world that its vibrato shapes our perceptions long before we even become attuned to them.  I want to blame the departures of my heart on the wilderness, as though the hard things shape me instead of the God who meets me in them.  But the truth is that the wilderness turns out to be a broad place, as David the poet-king called it, where God Himself places my feet and I find an unobstructed view of Him, where I, feeling the truth of my vulnerability, curl up against the one who gives me life.

Hagar, the abused maidservant of Sarah, could have lost herself to the desert, thought, in fact, she had a few times, except that God came to her there, and then, her eyes opened to the truth, she said, “’You are a God of seeing.  Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’”

And what is it that I absolutely know right now, except that God is here with me, that He sees me and knows, and that even through the wilderness where my soul feels lost, He still guides me home?

Location is everything, and I’m only as far off track as the distance I am from God, and it isn’t the wilderness that separates me now but the self-consumption I almost feel entitled to here.  What tips me off, because it’s the thing to which the shepherd keeps pointing in warning, isn’t how hard and obscure and unfruitful everything feels right now, but the way I want to put myself first.

You’ve lost track…it’s not all about you.

The Holy Spirit, as promised, faithfully brings to mind the words of Christ, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, that the one who would be great will be the servant of all, and He tugs out Paul’s words to the Philippians, when in the Spirit Paul wrote that they should do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others as more significant.

I breathe these words, continuing my prayer as the blinking needs of other drivers pulse around me, stopped behind a city bus that has just crawled in front of that dump truck.

Stilled, I take the good turn toward God, adding Adam’s words—I lost track–to the gratitude I feel over His protective shepherding of my heart.  How fitting that God has inserted this oft repeated confession, this honest refrain, into the background music of my life, because He has only ever been leading His children to freedom, and freedom comes when I admit my soul’s departures from His Way and gratefully acknowledge the vastness of His enduring love for me.  Love covers over a multitude of sin.

“Yes, I have definitely lost track,” I say to Adam, sitting back against my seat, and he dissolves into guffaws, his grin wide and wild, and reaches for me.

He likes it when he manages to use one of his collected phrases at the right time, finds joy in the moment when his interior world collides with our exterior circumstances.

He likes it when freedom for him winds up being freedom also for me.