As a child, I was terrified of being lost. I understood “being lost” as being separated from my parents. When I was five, I tried to spend the night away from home with a friend for the first time ever. Around nine o’clock, I asked my friend’s parents to call my parents so that they could come and pick me up. I longed for the safety of my own bed, which was only steps from my mom and dad.

As a teenager longing for a boy to kiss me; as a college student wondering if the God of my childhood could still love me; as a new pastor questioning if I could sustain this work forever; as a mother in need of silence and space, rest and renewal, I also felt lost, disconnected, sick, tired, and alone.

In all these times, I could hear the distant promise of Ezekiel’s prophecy during Israel’s exile in Babylon: “I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered.”

An active God who searches, rescues, gathers, heals, nurtures, and shows up for an entire people is the promise Ezekiel offers in today’s reading. It promises that the Creator of life longs to be with God’s people and is willing to act in order to make it so.

We need not choose between individual or communal disorientation in Ezekiel. Rather, both reveal themselves as part of what God seeks to make whole. God offers goodness, mercy, and healing to the individual sheep and to the collective herd. These offerings come with a promise that our hearts, our spirits, our minds, and our bodies will not be exiled forever.