Optional Prop: Shepherd’s crooked staff

Stories about hikers lost in the woods have some common features. At some point, everything starts to look and feel the same. Instead of moving forward, the lost hikers circle around and around endlessly until, exhausted, they collapse in tears, resigned to never getting out, sure that the journey is impossible, complicated, and ultimately vexed?

Thankfully, the helicopter or rescue vehicle snatches them from their lostness. And to their amazement they discover they were so very close to being found and freedom. If only they could have seen where they were from the perspective of above and not from below.

Here’s the rub. We can’t! Discovering the thick and thin of it, the thin and thick of life from the thorns and thickets of life, is part of our …