Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Psalm 23:6
Remember that C.S. Lewis was a young Atheist who was surprised by joy when God hunted for him. In plain terms, notice how he articulates that he did not find God but God found him. The mouse does not find the cat but the other way around.
“Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine.”
All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit.For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a
bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.
Of course I could do nothing—I could not last out one hour—without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call “prayer to God” breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest.
Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived. It became patently absurd to go on thinking of “Spirit” as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches. Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side?
My own analogy, as I now first perceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing. Hamlet could initiate nothing. Perhaps, even now, my Absolute
Spirit still differed in some way from the God of religion. The real issue was not, or not yet, there. The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed.
As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright
and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer.
It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said,
“I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.”
People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”
C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955) 213-214.
Though you can’t see the pheasant sitting on the ground, I had an epic late afternoon. Imagine driving 600 miles or 1,000 Km and then hunting for about 90 minutes and shooting 3 wild pheasant on a gorgeous day.
The phrase “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me” came to my mind. God’s goodness shined on me on my first of five vacation days. Best of all, Grace quartered and pointed like a veteran hunter.
Then I got to my room and found this gem from my favorite professor, C.S. Lewis. He was an atheist and describes how the absolute Spirit hunted him down. Think about it. God does that for us.
His goodness (undeserved blessings) and His mercy (not giving us what we deserve) follow, or literally chase after us, all the days of our lives.
How does it make you feel that God generously hunts and chases you all the days of your life?