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.