What if you were about to leave the country on vacation or on an important business trip and you couldn't find your passport? Imagine-- you're packing the night before and you go into your dresser, into the drawer where you always keep your passport, and it isn't there. You know that without it your trip is ruined-- you need that passport to get into the country you're intending to visit, and you certainly need it to get back into the U.S. What would you do? Pretty much everything you could think of. You'd take everything out of the drawer where the passport was supposed to be and look at each item one by one (mine is in my sock drawer, so i'd go through all my pairs of socks). You'd probably do that at least twice, if not more, because you're sure that is where the passport is supposed to be. That's where you always keep it. When that failed you'd sit down and try to remember when you last saw the passport, and trace your steps from there. You'd check the pockets in the clothes you think you were wearing the last time you had the passport (again, at least twice). You'd check other clothes you might have been wearing. You'd check the briefcase or purse or bag you had with you at the time. You'd try to remember if there was any place where you stopped while you had the passport-- maybe a drawer near the garage of your house where you might have put the passport just to get it out of your hands because something else came up. Then you might start calling people if you were travelling with a group the last time you had the passport. Did they see you do anything with it, you'd ask. Was there anything strange that came up that caused people to put their passports in a particular spot? Did anything strange happened with respect to their passports? I'm sure I have only scratched the surface, but you get the idea. You'd be desperate and there would be no limit to what you might do to find the missing document. It is that mindset that Jesus wants us to imagine when He talks in today's Gospel (Lk 15: 1-10) about the shepherd looking for the lost sheep, or the woman sweeping her house for the lost coin. He wants us to think there isn't anything that wouldn't be done to find what was lost. The message, of course, is that's how we should feel about reaching out to those who are separated from the Kingdom of God (Jesus calls them "sinners who repent"). We are told to look for them like we would look for that lost passport, to spare no energy, to ignore no possibility, in search of finding them and bringing them into the Kingdom. OK, so the obvious question is: do we do that? I think the answer is probably "no." When is the last time you reached out to someone who was lost, who was not connected with Christ, who needed to be found, and tried in every way you could think of to bring that person into the fold? Did you treat that activity like you would treat looking for you lost passport? Was it almost life or death? Or was it a "nice try" sort of situation where you did something-- perhaps very little-- and when you met with resistance you gave up? Would you have given up looking for your passport that easily? Jesus wants us to approach this task of bringing people into the Kingdom with a tremendous urgency, a "life or death" intensity. That's because in some sense it really is life or death. There are plenty of folks out there that need to be found. Will you have the energy that it takes to find them?