We often hear our friends and neighbors speak about their search for God. We admire their noble spiritual detective work, but we feel the need to interrupt their investigation and ask them who is the one who is really lost? God or them? While searching for a god or god-like state may be true of other faith traditions, it’s most certainly not true of Christianity. Thankfully, the way it really works is that God seeks us. God isn’t lost, we are. We may think we are on a safari to bag ourselves a God, but in reality He has sent out a search party to find us in the wilderness.

God isn’t a divine puppy that we pick out at a heavenly animal shelter but rather a Hound of Heaven hot on our heels. He isn’t a canine that we use for pet therapy but rather the Lion of Judah who isn’t safe but good.

I worked with men in the treatment program at the Union Gospel Mission. One day as we talked about our experiences with God it became clear that each of them had already had a brush with the divine. Some reported that He miraculously saved them from situations of certain death, others spoke of Him as an unwelcome sober passenger on a drug trip, while others reported actual conversations where they just told Him to go away. The last thing on their minds at the time was to find God yet there they were hounded by God. They even found that God had treed them but instead of coming down they continued to live on the skinny branches, recoiling with every cracking noise until they came crashing down and hit the bottom. Much to their surprise, He didn’t tear them to shreds but gave them new life, He didn’t inflict wounds but shared His scars. He didn’t send them packing but brought them home. It is reassuring to know that we don’t have to find our way out of the spiritual darkness by ourselves because we are relentlessly hounded by the one true God who never gives up on our scent.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10)

Photo by Yash Patel on Unsplash