Never having to backtrack.

Journeys are interesting adventures

I don't know about you, but I often get lost. I think I am following directions, and that I'm good. Until I don't arrive. And then I realize that somewhere along the way I missed a turn, or turned the wrong way.

I think that happens to us on our spiritual journey as well. We are going along fine, thinking that we are headed in the right direction until something happens that seems to say, "dead end". It may be distraction, it may be misunderstanding, but we do get lost.


Francis Thompson has an interesting poem that may speak to this journey. He wrote back in the early 1900s:

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.	5
Up vistaed hopes I sped;

Thompson is admitting the many ways we flee from God. Most of us are hardly aware of these flights. We may even think we are headed toward God. But life happens, and things become important, and we just lose our way in our effort to survive or make a living. We are not actually running from God. We are just trying to keep going.

But Thompson speaks to that wandering. He suggests that in reality, we flee God when we fail to make God the center of our search.

The wonderful part of Thompson's poem is not his realization of flight, but the realization that God was hounding him:

Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,

I find it a comforting thought that no matter where our journey takes us, we have Someone following us, not seeking to destroy or even condemn us, but to save.

What are the implications of this hounding? The Divine Being follows us so that when we realize that we have gotten lost on our journey, we don't have to walk all the way back to the beginning of our search and start all over again. All we have to do is turn around. And when we turn, we find that the Divine Hound who has followed close behind. Thompson writes God saying:

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?	170
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

The wonderful thing is, no journey, however wandering or lost it may  become, will ever be in vain. For the Hound of Heaven, God, is right there to make it count.

We have only to turn.