Father Craig was the pastor at my parish a few years ago, but I still remember him well for the focused little sermons he gave.

His homilies were among the shortest and best I've ever heard. He didn't waste time in repetition or pious verbiage. He used simple, declarative sentences that got right to the point.

And the point was always a good and true one --- something I'd often take home and chew on during the week. How many homilies can you honestly say that about?

There's one homily Father Craig gave that I still remember and think about now and then. As Lent approaches, it nags at me with the fundamental question: What am I looking for?

Father Craig's sermons would always begin with a personal vignette, usually humorous, sometimes more sobering. Once he told us that his grandfather was hanging on during a terminal illness, waiting for Father Craig, on loan to us from a Midwestern diocese, to come home.

But the homily I remember best began with Father Craig telling us about the day he and his cousin were out playing basketball. They were teenagers then, and in the course of their game one of the cousin's contact lenses was knocked out of his eye.

Remember the old days of "hard" contact lenses? If you're old enough to remember, you know they were not disposable. You bought a pair in the hopes it would serve you for a year or two, just like a pair of glasses, because a replacement would set you back quite a few bucks. Some people even took out contact lens insurance.

I remember searching the bathroom vinyl for my own lens. Once I even retrieved one from the bathroom drain with a straw covered in nylon and a vacuum hose. Soccer games were even halted while both teams searched for one kid's fallen lens.

So when the cousin's contact fell out, Craig's basketball stopped bouncing and both boys were on the ground, carefully maneuvering their hands and knees as they searched for the tiny lens. At last they gave up and went in the house, where they got something to drink and told Craig's uncle what happened.

"My uncle immediately went outside and started to look for that lens," said Father Craig, "and he kept looking and looking."

And he didn't stop looking until, remarkably, he found the lens.

Why, asked Father Craig, did the uncle find the lens but the teenage boys didn't?

"We didn't find it because we were looking for a lost contact," said the priest, "but my uncle was looking for a hundred dollars."

I'm not sure if the Gospel reading that day was the lost sheep or the lost drachma, but Father Craig made his point: We'll truly search and we'll not stop searching for what we really want to find, for what truly holds value for us.

I see that story as a metaphor for the Lenten journey that lies ahead. I can approach it casually, with the self-help kind of resolution that might net me a five-pound weight loss. I can show up at a few extra Masses or the weekly Stations of the Cross.

But am I doing these things because I'm on a quest for the central value of my life?

What we are searching for motivates how hard we search, how long we stay on our hands and knees until we find it.

The question to ask before Ash Wednesday: What am I looking for, and how will I try to find it?

Effie Caldarola is a columnist with Catholic News Service.