A Pastor’s Perspective

“Hound of Heaven” by Mike Hill, pastor of Calvary Chapel Aberdeen (mjhill@ida.net)

 Listen to CALVARY RADIO 90.3 FM

      My dog could find me anywhere.  When I was in elementary school, my best friend walked on all fours.  Mingo, a friendly black lab, was fiercely loyal to me.  When I had a bad day, he was there to cheer me up.  If I was struggling in school, suddenly he’d appear.  “How in the world did you find me here?”  I would reluctantly walk him off school grounds and attempt to send him home. 

     Francis Thompson, a poet who lived in the 19^th century, discovered the fierce loyalty of a compassionate God who relentlessly pursued him while an opium addict.  He wrote a poem about how the more he ran from God, the more God pursued him.  He titled the poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”  Thompson wrote, “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter”;…..But God “followed after.  But with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace.”  Many times people have the mistaken notion that we are the ones who “find” God.  However, He isn’t the One who is lost.  We are.  Scripture tells us that “there is none who seeks after God” (Romans 3:11b).  God is the One who pursues His lost sheep.  Isn’t that the point of the story Jesus tells of the shepherd who left the 99 sheep to find the one that was lost? (Luke 15:4-7).  God took the first step.  The reason we believe in Jesus and love Him is because we are simply responding to His love and passionate pursuit of us.  “We love him, because he first loved us” (1John 4:19).

     Marvin Olasky, a noted journalist, wrote of how God was his “Hound of Heaven” as he converted from being an atheist Communist to an unwavering Christian who stands for truth.  Olasky describes how he began to think, “What if Lenin was wrong?  What if God does exist?  Why was I heading down a dark corridor and refusing even to open a door that could be filled with light?  I pondered this hour after hour, suddenly thinking that I had done something very wrong by hugging Marx and Lenin.  When I sat down in that chair at 3 pm I was an atheist and a Communist.  When I got up at 11 pm I was not.  I was not doing drugs.  I was not sleeping.  I remember hour after hour looking at the clock, amazed that I was still in that chair.  I had no new data.  I had, through a process I did not understand, a new way of processing data.  At 11 pm I got up and spent the next two hours wandering around the cold and dark University of Michigan campus, crying out….to Someone” (World Magazine, March 2009). 

     Does your heart resonate with his longing for God?  God said, “And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).  Seek the Lord with your whole heart.  You just may discover that God has been the Hound of Heaven after you.