"Not all who wander," observed Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, "are lost."  How true this is.  To wander is to contemplate and meditate, expand and explore, to travel without a clear destination.  It is to be open to what comes our way.  And to grow and learn from it.  When we wander, we let go.  We let go of our plans and intentions, set aside our immediate ambitions.  We step away from the past, cast aside the future.  We don't plan, we don't frame.  We don't set a time.

    When we are lost, however, we are looking for something specific, a place or destination where we had hoped we would be.  We're missing something.  And we do not always know what it is. 

    But the nuances of being lost are complex.  Some twenty years ago, James was a prisoner on death row in the state of Texas.  In an interview he gave a week before he was to be executed for his crime, James acknowledged that all his life he had been lost.  He had never thought about what his life meant, never thought about where it began or where it was going.  He only did what was immediately before him.

    At some point in his imprisonment, however, James embraced Christianity.  He gave his heart to Jesus.  Everything changed.  He no longer felt lost.  In fact, he felt "found."  As a result, as he put it in the interview, "All my life, I never had a home.  Now [after he was executed] I'm going to have one."

    Wandering is essential.  Ironically, so is being lost.  For sometimes it is when we are the most lost that we are the most found.