Feeling lost

“Send me your light and your faithful care, let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.” (Psalm 43:3)

Do you ever feel lost?

In our modern world of GPS location and internet maps it’s easy to think we never need be lost again. But we also know that the maps on our mobile phones are not infallible. Sometimes they get things wrong, they put us in the wrong place or they lead us in the wrong direction. We have probably heard stories of people blindly following their SatNav off road and into a ditch; perhaps we have even experienced that ourselves.

What about our personal life – do we ever feel lost there? I imagine most of us have felt that way at some point or other, and maybe you are feeling that way right now. Despite technological advances, there is no spiritual SatNav in your car, or personal GPS on your phone. What do we do when we feel lost in our lives?

Psalm 43 gives us an answer for this dilemma. Psalms 42 and 43 are connected, both with their repeated refrain (“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?”) and the situation the psalmist finds themselves in. They speak of oppression, tears and being downcast – the feelings of being lost.

What then is the answer to feeling lost? Verse three of Psalm 43 is a prayer to God: “Send me your light and your faithful care, let them lead me”. We may not have a spiritual SatNav on our phones, but we have a God who will lead and guide us when we are lost. He will show us the way and direct us in the right paths.

The psalm gives us two sources of God’s direction: his light and his faithfulness. John tells us that “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5). When we feel lost it is often because we feel in darkness, unable to see the right way to go. God sends his light to dispel the darkness, because God is light. God’s person and character scatters the darkness, removing sin and shame and showing us what is good and right and pleasing to him.

The second way that God directs is through his faithfulness. “Send me your faithful care” says the Psalm – literally, send me your faithfulness, which is also the word for truth. God directs by his faithfulness, his reliability, his dependability in times of need. We see his faithfulness in his care for his people and in his truth revealed in his word.

Do we feel lost? God wants to direct and lead us. If we want to know the right way to go, we need to look at what God is like and what God has said. Those are faithful and reliable pointers to our destination. And our destination is God himself. “Let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell” concludes the psalmist. May God lead each one of us to himself, wherever we are and however lost we might feel.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash