Eventide & Altar

A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to search for the one that wandered off, and a woman turns her whole house over for one coin out of ten. Neither of them is being efficient. Both of them are showing what it looks like when the thing that is lost matters more than keeping the account tidy.

Paul lists his own impressive credentials tonight and then calls the whole thing loss, compared to actually knowing Christ. That is not false modesty from a young man with nothing to lose. It is a mature judgment from someone who had built something real and decided, deliberately, that it was not the point. A long life gives you the same chance Paul had - to look back at what you built and ask honestly whether it was ever the actual thing that mattered, or only what you had instead of the thing that mattered while you were still building it.

Everything lost eventually turns up somewhere, even if not in this life. That is the confidence underneath tonight's parables, and it applies specifically to the names in your own book - people who feel, some nights, as lost to you as that one sheep or that one coin. They are not lost to the one who is searching for them. Search for one of them tonight the same way the woman searched for her coin, with the lamp lit and every corner swept.

The Luminous Mysteries tonight, since it is Thursday. Offer the third mystery, the Proclamation of the Kingdom, for everyone in your book who needs the same mercy the lost sheep and the lost coin received.

• For the grace to search for what's lost as persistently as the shepherd and the woman, we pray to the Lord.
• For everyone who feels far from God or from the people who love them tonight, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, especially any who felt lost or forgotten before they died, we pray to the Lord.

Choose one name from your book tonight and pray for that person specifically, as though you were searching for them the way the woman searched for her coin.