Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he
said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you
are my little bunny.”
Perhaps you recognize the opening lines of Margaret Wise
Brown’s children’s book The Runaway Bunny. Spoiler alert:
they also preview the entire plot. A little bunny tells his
mother that he plans to run away. We don’t know why, but
he wants to escape. He has many ways to evade his mother,
but it turns out that she can go to equally extraordinary
lengths to find him. If he becomes a fish swimming in
a stream, she will become a fisher and catch him. If he
becomes a bird, she will become a tree in which he can
land. If he becomes a little boy, she will be the maternal
presence he comes home to. Ultimately, escape proves
impossible. The bunny’s mother’s love is simply too strong.
The writer of Psalm 139 sounds a similar note: Where can
I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
To the heights of heaven? To the depths of hell? The farthest
sea? The darkest night? Where can I go to escape you?
But why ask at all? Why would anyone want to run from
God? What could make faith so difficult or life so demanding
that we consider giving it up? Why run from God?
I’ve collected a few answers over the years. By no means a
comprehensive list, but think of it as a sample set.
Some give up, run away, because faith does not—
immediately or ever—make life easy. If our expectation
is that religious conviction is like a magic wand over
the struggles of our lives, we will often find ourselves
disappointed. In fact, faith can have the opposite effect.
It will ask something of us. Make demands. Require
reevaluation of our deeply held priorities and a change in
our carefully arranged plans. Some would rather do what
they please, and the boundaries of faith can be stifling. Why
follow a God who demands of us compassion and sacrifice
when you can live simply for yourself and justify any means
that lead to success? Discipleship is hard work because it is
important work.
And if that’s not enough to make you run away, there is the
decidedly mixed and not always pretty record of religious
institutions when it comes to meeting the demands faith
makes of us. I have heard it with increasing frequency in
recent years.
An erosion of trust in faith communities, contributing to a
growing doubt in the truths we claim. Hypocrisy among the
faithful—speaking one way and living another—harms our
witness and damages our credibility. Following the Spirit,
whose call explicitly extends to all nations, some make
exclusive nationalist claims. Some disciples of Jesus choose
judgment over grace. Some cast aspersions against others.
We all read the same text. We all read the prophets’ call to
justice for the oppressed and care for the poor, and then
look the other way when justice is denied, and the poor are
forgotten. The witness of the church proves time and time
again that we are broken people living in a broken world. We
break our promises. And so, some flee from faith and point
to these failures. They run away.
But institutional failure and the demands of faith are not the
only causes for spiritual apathy. Some resist for a deeper
reason—surrender feels unimaginable. We have all been
shaped by hyper-individualism, which insists that the
self is the highest authority. Humility gives way to hubris.
Communal accountability succumbs to mantras like “to
thine own self be true” or its modern cousin “you do you.”
To submit to a greater power or a deeper truth feels like
defeat—and defeat is the one thing we must never allow.
When faith is hard, when institutions fail, when we are asked
to yield, we flee. We give up. We run away. But here is the
twist taught by that runaway bunny. It will never work. The
Psalmist tried it. So have we. God’s love is simply too strong.
One of the reasons I love this particuar Psalm is because it
portrays a note of menace from the divine. Something like
this: Go ahead; try to escape. See how far you get.
Yes, we have tried. And the one conclusion that seems
unanimous among us is this: the results of our retreat
have been dismal. It is not a new revelation. Long after the
psalmist and long before us, St. Augustine spent years trying
to flee from God. He chased every other path he could find
until he finally came to believe that the only way out was
back to God.
Friends, we are surrounded. Where can I go from your Spirit?
Answer: I come to the end, I am still with you. This is the
picture of a pursuing God. The Jewish philosopher Martin
Buber captured this truth in poetic form. Where I wander –
You! Where I ponder – You! Only You, You again, always You!
Sky is You, Earth is You! You above! You below! In every trend,
at every end—only You, You again, always You!
In my favorite story of scripture, at a time when God seemed
to have stopped speaking and visions were rare, the voice of
the holy comes to a young boy named Samuel in the middle
of the night as he sleeps in the temple. Sam assumes the
voice belongs to the elderly priest Eli, who has taken Samuel
in as an apprentice. The voice speaks his name, “Samuel!” a
name which means “God has heard.” The boy gets up from
his bed and goes to Eli. Three times this sequence repeats
itself until the old priest realizes the voice might belong
to God, and he is right. It is God’s mysterious, persistent,
relentless call that initiates the encounter. God will stay at
it as long as it takes. Sam is not in pursuit of an elusive and
evasive God. No, he is surrounded by the God who will not
quit on him.
The mystic, activist, theologian, preacher, and pastor
Howard Thurman describes it this way: “There is something
in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of
the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever
have. And if you cannot hear it, all your life you will spend
your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”
That sound—the sound of the genuine—was what Samuel
heard in the Temple. It’s what stopped his running in circles
and set his life in forward motion. Not toward ease, not
toward perfection, not even toward power. But toward
purpose. From that night on, Sam knew what he was living
for. So, what about you?
It seems to me, this is one of the great struggles of our time.
All of us are running, but not all of us have a destination
in mind. Many of us are running from, but not running to.
Others settle for the fleeting goal of material success or
personal gain. We put faith in that which will never meet our
deepest needs or fulfill the longing of our soul.
St. Augustine, after years of wandering, could finally throw up
his hands and say, “Oh God, You have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Friends,
our hearts will never be at rest so long as we insist on living
against the grain of our created purpose. You cannot serve
God and mammon. You cannot find life’s meaning while
pursuing meaningless ends. Might as well surrender.
Now, surrender is not defeat but trust in the One who knows
how to hold us better than we know how to hold ourselves.
This is why Psalm 139 can make the turn from running to
resting. Surrender reshapes our identity.
My favorite story of surrender belongs to Anne Lamott. In
her memoir, she describes how in her early thirties she was
battling addiction and living all alone on a houseboat in San
Francisco. On Sundays, she could be found wandering the
flea market, drawn by gospel music from a small, run-down
Presbyterian church. She began lingering in the doorway,
Sunday after Sunday, listening to the music, always leaving
before the sermon. No one pressured her to stay, but the
warmth of the congregation and the genuineness of their
singing pulled her back week after week.
One Sunday, she was too sick, too hungover, to stand for the
hymns or leave before the sermon. The music overwhelmed
her, Lamott writes, “as if the people were singing between
the notes. The last song was so deep and raw and pure that
I could not escape it…I felt like their voices were holding
me, like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it
washed over me.” She fled home, but as she walked down
the dock, she sensed a presence following her. Finally, in her
own doorway, she whispered, “Okay. I quit.” And then, out
loud, “All right. You can come in.”
In my own life, God’s pursuit has been marked by a
patient persistence. I try to hold it all together on my own. I
micromanage and organize and reach for control and cling
to the calendar. And God does not give me up. Nor does
God leave me to my illusions of power. When I finally give in,
it is not defeat. It is relief.
When will you stop running and let God find you? What if
today is the day you let God in?
“Shucks” said the bunny, “I might just as well stay where I am
and be your little bunny.” And so he did.
“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny.
The world demands our ceaseless striving. False gods
exhaust us with endless demands. In the chaos and the
noise, the voice of God calls, “Stop running. Surrender—not
in defeat, but in trust. Rest your heart in the One who has
been pursuing you all along.
So before you give up—on faith, on hope, on the possibility
that God is near—give in. Give in to the relentless love of
God. Have a carrot. You belong to God.