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The most famous conversion in modern Christian history did not begin with a man searching for God; it began with a man trying very hard to get away from him.
That man was C.S. Lewis.
He was thirty years old, a tutor in English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a confirmed atheist of the kind who had written off Christianity as silly and naive. Lewis had set out to live an examined life on his own terms, and he was finding, to his irritation, that the terms kept being rearranged by someone other than himself. His friends had inconveniently turned out to be Christians. His favorite authors had also inconveniently turned out to be Christians. Even the books he picked up to confirm and bolster his unbelief were conspiring against him. As he later admitted, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
By the spring of 1929, God’s pursuit of Clive Staples Lewis had closed in. He describes it himself in Surprised by Joy:
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.”
Notably here, Lewis is not the seeker; he is the one being sought. He is not the hunter; he is the hunted. The whole encounter has the texture of a tired mouse finally giving up his running and hiding, only to discover that the cat has come not to devour him but to carry him home.
This is closer to the actual, biblical picture of conversion than the self-directed one we naturally assume. We are taught to think of faith as our project, our spiritual ascent. God is somewhere up there, we are down here, and the work of religion is to climb toward him with whatever rungs we can find on the ladder. Spiritual life becomes a search, a quest, and the question is always whether we are getting any closer. God is the goal at the top of the mountain, and we are the climbers, panting our way up.
The Bible tells a different story.
The first question in Scripture is not asked by a human being. It is asked by God. After Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and felt the rush of shame and tried to cover themselves with leaves and slip behind the foliage, they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. They do what we have all done since: they hide. And it is then that the voice of their Maker comes through the trees.
Painter, American, 1738 - 1820
“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9).
It is one of the most tender questions in Scripture, and if we are going to understand both God and ourselves rightly, it is essential that we hear it correctly. God is not lost. He is not confused about geography. He knows exactly where Adam and Eve are. The question is not for his information; it is for theirs. He is the one who has come walking in the garden, looking for the people he loves, even though they are the ones who have run from him. The verb, the action, the first move, does not belong to Adam in this scene. It belongs to God. Before any conviction of sin happens in the human heart, before any altar has been built or any sacrifice offered, before any prayer has been uttered, God is already on his feet, moving toward us.
God is the first searcher.
That same posture runs through the whole canon of Scripture, all the way to the One who is its center. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in John 4, he is the one who arrives first. He is the one who sits down and waits. He is the one who breaks every cultural script by speaking directly to her. And in the middle of their conversation, he tells her something that ought to take our breath away: “the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:23). The Greek verb here is zētei, which is the present active form of “to seek.” It is what a shepherd does when a sheep is missing. It is what a woman does when a coin is lost. It is what the father in the Luke 15 parable does when he scans the road, day after day, hoping his son might return home.
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The Father is seeking.
Not waiting. Not watching.
Seeking.
Which means, if Scripture is to be trusted, that your faith began long before you noticed it. It was activated and made real long before it ever crossed your mind. Whatever search you think you are conducting for God is the echo, the shadow, and the wake of his prior search for you.
I put it this way in The Mercy King:
“It is easy to imagine God as distant, distracted, or too busy for us. But if we could see what God is really up to, we would know beyond any doubt that he is pursuing us also. David knew this when he wrote, ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’ (Psalm 23:6). That same mercy followed Adam and Eve. When they hid in shame among the trees, God came looking for them, called out to them, and met them in their fear, not to abandon them, but to begin the long work of redemption that would one day remake the human heart.”
If you have spent any portion of your life feeling like a poor seeker, like someone whose prayers limp and whose faith stutters and whose awareness of God comes and goes like a sneeze, this is for you. You have been operating, perhaps without knowing it, on the assumption that the spiritual life rises or falls on the strength of your own initiative and pursuit. It does not. Your initiative and pursuit, real as it is, is the smaller portion of the story. The larger and most prevailing portion is that the Holy Spirit, or the One some theologians have called the Hound of Heaven, has been on your trail since before you knew his name, and he is still on your trail now, patient and tireless and unembarrassed and undeterred by your reluctance.
The most reluctant convert in all of England did not climb his way up to God. God came down the corridors of Magdalen, night after night, until there was nowhere left for C.S. Lewis to hide. And the gifts we have received from Lewis since, the Narnia Chronicles and Mere Christianity, The Four Loves and The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain and Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce, are not, finally and ultimately, gifts from Lewis at all. Lewis himself would object to that idea. Rather, they are gifts from the God who pursued him into a corner, so that generations of readers might be pursued through his pen.
Where, then, are you?
The question is there not so God can find you. He already has. He is asking because he loves the sound of your voice and the sight of your return, and because the cat has been at your heels for longer than you know, not to devour you, but to gather you up and carry you home.
Where in your story can you now see God was already searching for you before you knew it?
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