Does God Actually Love Us?

Dear reader, 

I hope you are well, this letter is for your encouragement. I hope you see it as such. 

When was the last time you acknowledged someone chasing you?

Maybe it was your fiancé pursuing you in a marital sense or a cop chasing you down because you were driving 19 over the speed limit, or perhaps it was your dog chasing you because you had his favorite toy in your clutches and he wanted it back. 

As most of you know, I was a daycare teacher. I primarily taught 4-5-year-olds, but to help give the other teachers breaks throughout the day I could and would often swap into the different age groups. 

We have an indoor play area that the age groups rotate through, and once they are unleashed into this arena they (almost) always want one thing. 

“Chase me, Mitchell.”

They want me to chase them around the room making monster noises. You might think, what an odd thing to ask for. But let's go back to our childhoods. How often did we enjoy being chased in the game tag? Or cops and robbers, or even capture the flag, there is something woven into our very being that excites us when we are being chased. 

Which makes me think of God, our Father, our Savior, and our Bridegroom. As we run from Him, he is never far behind. 

I believe I am right to assume we all run from God here and there in our life. We aren’t perfect, our choices don’t always glorify the Creator as they should. Yet His perfect love is never far from our reach. 

He is Omnipresent. He is everywhere all at once. If we ever played Tag against Him we’d always lose, yet he lets us run away. He gives us the choice to walk by his side, walk in his Spirit (Galatians 5:16-17) which makes me wonder, “Does God enjoy chasing us?”

If one of His sheep stray from the fold, does He enjoy seeking them out and bringing them back?

I don’t propose this thought to encourage you to sin, quench the Holy Spirit, or even run completely from God and the gift of Salvation that He’s offered to you.

I bring it up because I can look at my past. My short history up until this point, and I can think of key moments in my life where I was running away from God with my middle fingers up to the sky. Even when it looked like I was glorifying God in word and deed on the outside, my peers and my church family couldn’t have guessed. 

But between me and my savior, we were as far as I could be. And He let me! That breaks my heart to think of the lover of my soul let me hate Him. He let me run away from Him. He knew He would catch back up to me. He knew that I needed to be in His loving embrace to feel that perfect peace that surpasses all my understanding. 

God loves us enough to let us go. That makes me think of that cheesy Passenger song “Let Her Go.” The main point the song is stating is that the most loving thing that you can do for people sometimes is to let them run from you. Let them walk away. Jesus did that with the Rich Young Ruler. He stated what he needed to do for eternal life, but the man walked away and Jesus didn’t stop and change the requirements for him.

I say all that to really stress the reality of God’s love for us. While we are walking on this earth we can get so distracted that we don’t give God the smallest fractions of our attention. I’m preaching to myself here. The amount of time that He gives to us whenever we call out for help, and yet we can’t sit and meditate on his goodness, grace, and his Gospel.

If you’re reading this I hope these words ring true. If you are running from God, please stop. Turn around and embrace Him. Look into the eyes of your savior and see His everlasting love for you. 

Sincerely your fellow runaway, 

-Mitchell