Matthew 10:6

Jesus is sending out his twelve closest followers on their first solo mission to share the good news of God's kingdom. In the verses surrounding this one, he gives them instructions about where to go and where not to go — and here he tells them to focus specifically on the 'lost sheep of Israel.' This is a vivid image: Jewish people who had wandered from God, like sheep scattered from their flock. Jesus wasn't telling his disciples the rest of the world didn't matter. He was grounding their mission: start close. Start with your own people. The disciples were Jewish men being sent to Jewish communities — people they shared history, language, and faith tradition with.

God, it's so easy to dream about the faraway mission while ignoring the person right next to me. Open my eyes to the lost sheep in my own life — the ones I've stopped really seeing. Give me the courage to start close, to show up for the people already in my story. Amen.

We tend to romanticize the faraway mission. There's something that feels more significant about a calling that involves a plane ticket or a dramatic life change — something easier to talk about than the quieter, harder work of turning toward the person who's already in front of you. Jesus looked at twelve men ready to change the world and pointed them at the neighborhood. Go to the lost ones — the ones who have drifted, the ones overlooked by the religious establishment, the ones who feel like they no longer belong. Start there. It's genuinely easier to feel compassion for abstract, distant need than to sit with the specific, complicated, sometimes frustrating person who shares your last name or your office or your pew. But Jesus keeps redirecting people back to the immediate. Who in your life right now is a lost sheep — someone you've quietly written off, someone you've been meaning to check on for months, someone whose drift you've noticed but not responded to? Sometimes the whole mission starts with one phone call you've been putting off for no good reason.