run, rabbit, run

(This is several weeks old at least, but I just rediscovered the draft the other day, so here it is for your reading perplexity.)

I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream in which my mother, my sister, and I were first threatened, then stalked and ambushed, by a gunman on the campus of a local Christian college. Two minutes before my alarm went off and released me, we were cowering in a furnace room at the top of some stairs, while the gunman and some well-meaning but incompetent college guys battled it out below. There were more stairs to an escape, but we couldn't get to them, couldn't move, couldn't stop listening and waiting. Somehow the terror of the dream (intense as any I can recall, and slow to wear off upon waking) was unmitigated by the fact that our assailant was dressed up as Godzilla.

I'm serious - the dream was terrifying; and when I did snap out of it, there was none of that oh, whew, it was just a dream. In fact, the fear didn't completely go away until the sun had come up and the radio had been piping cheerful music for awhile. Weird, huh? Kind of childish?

It might be because of one of my deepest gut fears - not the subconsciously intellectual kind, like the fear of failure, or the fear of commitment, or of germs - but the stomach-dropping, no-brain-activity-needed, paralyzing kind of fear that smashes into you like a tidal wave and makes you a rabbit in a den of lions. It's the fear of being chased. Being hunted.

The adult in me (she really is in there somewhere) knows the answers. I know that the chances of my actually being gunned down - particularly by Godzilla - are really quite low. And I know that, even if by some strange chance that should prove to be my fate, fretting about it ahead of time will only waste today. And I know that the worst anyone could do is kill my body, and that, unless Jesus returns, it'll have to die somehow or other, anyway. And I know that whenever and however death does claim me, it will only be the gate to an everlasting life of bliss and glory beyond imagination. Death has been conquered by my precious Savior, and all the ragings of His and our enemies are only like so many handfuls of sand thrown into the wind. Can it hurt the wind? It will only come back to sting their own eyes. And over it all is the almighty hand of loving Providence, a hand from which I cannot slip. Cannot. I know this.

But the child in me still trembles. To be hunted - to be sought out and chased down for evil intent - there are few enough things in the world that terrify quite so deeply.

Which is really ironic, since one of the trademark characteristics of the maturing feminine psyche (to which I claim no immunity) is a deep-rooted desire to be pursued. Pursued and, when the time is right, caught. And so on the far-removed other end of what turns out to be the same spectrum, I'll admit that one of my greatest desires in this life, if God permits it, is to find and marry and love a godly man, and to raise a family with him for our Lord. (This is not an advertisement.)

So on the one hand, paralyzing fear of being hunted; on the other, God-given (though oft-twisted) desire to be pursued. Come again? But it's all in the intent.

Just as the ignorant, self-serving, wicked child I once was, and still am in part, looked back in terror as I perceived an angry God thundering in my wake, breathing down my neck, knowing what I'd done and poised to devour me for it. But guess what happened.

You'll guess wrong (who could have guessed right?), so I'll tell you. He caught me - but when He had taken off my blindfold and breathed life into my cold lungs, I saw that He had snatched me not into hell, but out of it. He had always been coming, and not to destroy, but to restore. It was love that pursued me, and not vengeance; love, and that mystery of mercy and justice; love unbounded.

When I was still dead, He chased after me and made me live.
When I stray, He still pursues, and always brings me back.
He teaches me to seek Him, to pursue Him with all my heart.
He won't give up the chase until He's brought me safely home.