Wherever you go, there you are. This little Zen koan seems simple enough, but putting the truth of it into practice takes mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn has written a book titled with the koan and subtitled Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. After my last heart episode, my doctor, Bob Fine, prescribed the book along with statin drugs. I’m afraid I have devoted myself more religiously to the drugs than the meditation practices, although when the stresses of life reach the point of a personal foul for piling on, I do repeat over and over the Jesus Prayer that my poet friend Scott Cairns taught me, in the seated position Kabat-Zinn recommends. The prayer is simple: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The book teaches the practice of mindfulness in various ways, but the underlying objective is to empty yourself of the cares of the past and the future so that you can be filled with the experience of life where you are in the present moment.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, because we are always tempted to live too much in a past that has gone wrong or a future that might. Our two texts today offer examples of mindfulness that lead to spiritual welfare. They both deal with life gone terribly wrong. I wonder if this has any relevance to anyone here today. I’m just curious; show of hands, please: How many would say that your life has gone exactly to plan? Right, that’s what I thought. So, just to be sure, show of hands again, said another way: How many have found yourself living a life somewhat different from the one you expected? Please look around. Now, let me assure you that the show of hands in this room is defective due to small sample size. You have not come to a life-recovery workshop of only those that have experienced crisis. Or maybe you have. This is simply the human condition.

Many of you would testify that this is a good thing—you are glad you are living a life different from the one you imagined. Life surprises us with good things at unexpected turns in the road. But most of us also know a feeling of being in exile from the comfortable life we once knew or expected. Like Israel in Babylonian exile or the ten lepers in exile from their families and friends and even from their own bodies due to illness, most of us go through times of unwanted exile that makes us think our lives are permanently ruined. But are they? Jeremiah and Luke say otherwise.

Consider Israel. The Israelites once had a great story to tell. They were slaves in Egypt. No future. No freedom. Sub-human. God delivered them. Rescued them from the cruel hand of Pharaoh. Marched them through the waters. Saved them. Guided them through the desert. Gave them laws to live by. Taught them how to be a people with ordered lives and rich worship. Brought them into a land flowing with milk and honey. Made them a great nation. Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem. Life was good.

And then it all came crashing down. Within five hundred years the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians. And a century and a half later, the best and the brightest of the southern kingdom of Judah had been carted off to Babylon. It was all over. Or so it seemed.

Every morning the people of God had to wake up in what is modern-day Iraq. They were not so much slaves as forced immigrants. They had to figure how to live in a strange land among foreigners who neither knew their God nor cared. No doubt they spent some time wallowing in their sorrows. No doubt they spent some of their time blaming themselves or others. In some of the psalms we hear echoes of these things. But all that does is keep you stuck and leave you dependent on your circumstances. It doesn’t accomplish anything of much good for you or for anyone else.

I got that sense this week from listening to the outcry of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. He is the former top commander of the U.S. military forces in Iraq. He was replaced in 2006 after the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Although he was cleared of any wrongdoing himself, he was denied a fourth star as a general, and it was clear that for political reasons at least, his career was over. So now, a year later, in a retirement that must feel like exile, he is fighting back. He is calling the Bush administration’s handling of the war “catastrophically flawed,” stemming from “incompetent strategic leadership” that was “derelict in its duties” and suffered from a “lust for power.”

God knows he may be exactly right. And no one today would deny the tragic mess we are caught in there that seems to leave us with few hopeful outcomes. But how productive is this way of dealing with his life’s exile? Dissent can be an act of patriotism. And holding our elected officials accountable is our national duty. But Sanchez’s criticisms come off sounding more like sour grapes than strong medicine. They seem to be about redirecting blame more than about offering constructive wisdom.

God directed the Israelites to embrace their exile and do something positive with it rather than allow it to eat away at them and destroy their souls. And this they did. The truth is, Israel’s exile in Babylon was perhaps the most important and formative time in the history of God’s people. Deprived of the settled comforts of home and institutions, the priests turned to writing, collected older writings, and shifted the emphasis of worship from temple-based to text-based life. Scripture and the study of Scripture became the center of the community. The intellectual life of the people took off in exile. They learned their own story and mastered it, because they had to counter the stories of their unwanted hosts about who they were, who God is, and how the world is organized. And to do so, they even learned to engage the culture of the Babylonians, thriving in that land among a different people.

Israel laid the foundation for Judaism during the exile. They created synagogue worship, which would become the model for not only Jewish study of the Scripture but for even Christian scholarship. They made learned scholars the most admired people in their communities. Rabbis were models that parents wanted to marry off their daughters to, more so even than to wealthy people. And I daresay that because of the way Israel responded to its exile in Babylon, the world has been blessed in innumerable ways. Anyone who wants to scapegoat the Jews by claiming they have infiltrated and undermined existing cultures by their presence doesn’t account for the extraordinary achievements they have brought to those cultures. The intellectual and human contributions of the Jews in every nation of the Western world have been so alarmingly significant that you can hardly imagine the world as modern without them. Jews learned in Babylon how to live in exile, and, since until 1948 they lacked a homeland or their own, they have had to live that way most of the time. Everywhere they have been, they have made that place better. They have sought the welfare of the city they have lived in, and in its welfare they have found their own.

The lepers, too, never gave up on their healing. They sought the help of the Lord, came to Jesus, and begged for healing. When they were healed, they headed back to the community to live as the formerly unclean. They would never just be clean; they would always be the formerly unclean.

That’s just the way it is. It may seem unfair, but the question is, what you will do with that? Some of you feel that you have been deprived of the life you expected and maybe think you deserved. Your parents divorced and left you insecure. You went through a divorce, and you feel lost on your own. You lost a job or a loved one or a dream, and you think your life will never be the same again. It won’t. Accepting that is the first step.

Seven years ago Al Gore tallied the most votes in the general election for president, but he lost the decisive electoral vote that made George W. Bush president. He was exiled from the life he believed he deserved and spent some time growing his beard and putting on weight. (I am familiar with both of those strategies, don’t you know?!) Well, this week the Nobel Prize committee announced that Gore is being honored for his work in addressing the problem of global warming and its dangers to the earth’s future. This is not a new interest for Gore, but he hunkered down in his exile, quit blaming others for his situation, and set himself to focusing on the welfare of others. Which turns out has improved his own welfare.

We most of us live at income levels and in social circles that decry government welfare programs for the poor. We say they make people dependent and rob them of initiative. Since the Welfare Reform Act of 1994, when Democrats and Republicans got together to end welfare as we know it, we have heard less about the problem. We have not solved poverty by a long shot, but we have learned that wallowing in a state of exile and becoming dependent upon your circumstances is crippling. The way forward by getting on to welfare—that is, by getting on to contributing to the welfare of others.

But the story of the one leper who returned to Jesus to give thanks and praise God goes on step further. There’s a difference between being free from illness and being well. Jesus healed all ten lepers. The other nine did nothing wrong by doing exactly as Jesus said and returning to their community as ex-lepers, bearing witness thereby to the power of God to heal and renew. The one leper who returned, however, knew something more. Your faith has made you well, Jesus said. Well, Jesus had healed the man’s leprosy, but the man’s faith—his gratitude to God, his spirit of thankfulness—had an additional effect. It healed him on the inside. It made him well.

As long as you live, you will be affected by the story of your life, even if you make the most of your exile experience and get on to welfare by becoming fruitful in the place you find yourself. Remember, wherever you go, there you are. But only by ordering your spirit toward God and living a life of gratitude and worship will you become well.

Others may always see you as the ex-slave or the ex-leper or the ex-general or the ex-politician or the ex-spouse, or whatever other ex- is related to your exile. But you can know yourself differently. You can become well enough to see yourself on a journey through and beyond exile.

The life you have is all the life there is. You can make more of it by getting on to welfare. But you can make the most of it only when you become well in it. And you can become well in it only when you can say in genuine joy and gratitude, Thanks be to God?