Rabbit Trail #10 – Playing Tag with God

Today is May Day, the first day of May and I thought it would be a good time for a Rabbit Trail. Something that has been ruminating in my life for the past several months has been the concept of pursuing God. Some of this has come from an amazing book by A.W. Tozer call “The Pursuit of God”. There is a tension implicit in this book, and in my experience, in our walk with God…The tension is between knowing and being known….to pursuing God and being pursued by God… Seeking and being sought after.

It is almost as if we are engaged in a cosmic game of tag or hide and seek. Sometimes it feels like we are “it” and we are in hot pursuit of God and other times it feels like we are hiding and God is seeking. I have come to the conclusion that the spiritual “game” we are playing is unlike any earthly analogue in that we can be both hiding and seeking at the same time, and God can be both pursuing us and allowing us to be free of God if we choose at the same time. I think part of the reason for this duality is that we are trying to play a spiritual “game” with our earth-bound bodies. This is little bit like fully suited up football players trying to play their game in a swimming pool…it just would not work….they would be suited up for the wrong game.

Galatians 4:8-9 talks about this dynamic tension: “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces ? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?”. It is almost as if we can choose to play by spiritual rules — know and be known by God — or we can choose to play by earthly rules, ” weak and miserable forces”.

I think that most of the conflicts and trials we experience can be traced to wanting to play our own game apart from God. This is a game we will eventually loose, not because God stops searching for us, but because we get so good at hiding from God that we convince ourselves that God has stopped looking. The Good News is that God never stops looking and in the end God wins.