He Goes After The Driven Away

The gate goes in the night, some time after two, and by morning the wind has laid the whole hedge over sideways and there is a young ewe standing in a valley she has never seen before.

She did not decide anything. That is the part worth getting right. There was thunder over the ridge and something came through the broken gate and the dogs were out and the whole flock moved as one frightened body, and she went with it, and then the flock turned and she did not, because a wall was in the way, and by the time the noise stopped she was somewhere with no smell she recognized in it.

She will not come home on her own. Not out of stubbornness. She would come if she knew how. But the route from where you are driven to is not the route you know, and a creature standing in a strange field at first light does not have a map, she has a heartbeat and a fence and no idea which way is back.

So at ten past six the farmer is walking the top track with the wind still up, counting, and coming up one short, and then not looking at the ninety nine at all.

And you know what it is to be one short in somebody's count and to hear nothing about it for a very long time. You did not leave. Something happened, and afterward you were outside, and you have been standing in a field ever since. And on the morning of the day you used to go, your body still gets ready at the hour. Your hands stop halfway through the dishes. You have been waiting, without ever once saying it out loud, for the phone to ring and somebody to say we noticed.

Lost and driven away are two different words

God says both of them, in the same breath, in a sentence He speaks about Himself.

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.Ezekiel 34:16

Read the second clause slowly, because most people read straight over it and it is the one with your name on it.

Lost is what happens when a creature wanders. It puts its head down in the good grass and follows the good grass and looks up an hour later somewhere else. There is no villain in it and there is no storm in it. It is a drift.

Driven away is not a drift. Driven away is passive. Something else did it. It is the word for a creature that ended up outside because it was moved there by a force that was not its own will, and God did not fold that into the general word for lost. He said it separately, out loud, in the same sentence, because He knows the difference between a sheep that strayed and a sheep that was pushed, and He was not willing to leave the second one unnamed.

You were driven, and God has His own word for that, and it is not the word for wandering off. Ezekiel 34:16 puts driven away in writing as its own category, and the Holy Spirit did not lose the distinction somewhere between that page and your kitchen.

That verse also tells you where the work sits. Every verb in it belongs to God. I will seek. I will bring again. I will bind up. I will strengthen. There is no clause in there where the sheep is instructed to make her own way back across a country she has never seen, and there is no clause where the flock is told to go and take a vote about whether she still counts.

You have a place among God's people that no room was ever holding on His behalf. Ezekiel 34:16 says the Shepherd Himself does the seeking, and His Spirit is doing it in the very kitchen where you are standing with your hands stopped over the water.

What this day is not for

Something needs saying plainly here, and then we will move on from it.

This is not the day to hold court over what happened to you. Not because it did not matter. It mattered, and God is not vague about people who are hurt, and there is nothing about your situation that has escaped His notice or His care. But your place among His people was never in that building's gift in the first place, which means no verdict about that building, in either direction, could restore something the building never held.

And nothing here is telling you to go back. Nothing here is telling you not to. Nobody is putting a date on anything. That whole question can sit exactly where it is today, untouched, and this can still be the day the thing underneath it gets settled.

Because the thing underneath it is not a decision about a room. It is a question about whether you are still one of His.

You are being sought right now, and being sought is a different thing from being expected back. It is written as I will and not as she ought to, and the same Spirit who moved over the face of the waters is moving over one hillside where one creature is standing in the wrong valley.

Being expected back puts the walking on you. It stands at a door with its arms folded and waits to see whether you can manage the journey, and it counts your absence as evidence about your heart. Being sought does the opposite. It puts on a coat. It goes out in the weather. It walks the top track at ten past six in the wind, and it is not walking there because you earned the walk. It is walking because of who the walker is.

It is already His work to find you, and it was not quietly reassigned to you while you were out of the room. Ezekiel 34:16 keeps every one of those verbs on Him, and the Holy Spirit has not handed a single one of them back.