Paul Kingsworth sensed that he was the object of a steady, unrelenting pursuit. It was an unwelcome thought until he finally surrendered to it. Kingsworth is an Oxford-educated environmentalist, world traveler, and writer. In an article in “First Things,” he tells the happy story of what happened to reset the trajectory of his life.
From his childhood, Kingsworth dismissed religion. “The message seemed irrelevant… Where was the mystery? Where was the promised connection with God? Who was this God anyway? A man in the sky with a book of rules?” In retrospect, he realizes what he missed. “I didn’t know back then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God.” What a concise statement of the human condition.
It was G.K. Chesterton’s statement that describes the next chapter of Kingsworth’s life. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” Chesterton wrote, “they will worship the world.” Kingsworth, being intrigued by the “intense wonder and mystery of the natural world,” became what he calls “a priest of the witch gods,” embracing a nature religion. “At last I was home where I belonged,” he writes, “in the woods, worshipping a nature goddess under the stars. I even got to wear a cloak. Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Until I started having dreams.”
One night, he had an explicit dream about Jesus. It was so vivid, he remembered what Jesus had said and how he looked. In the coming days, he began to encounter Christians everywhere! They kept reminding him of Jesus. “Every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being… hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did.” Then one evening just before he was to conduct a ritual, he became so violently ill he could not continue. He was stunned. But He knew why.
C.S. Lewis experienced “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” Francis Thompson wrote of “the hound of heaven.” Like them, Kingsworth finally surrendered. “I became a Christian,” he writes, “because I knew, suddenly, that it was true.” Kingsworth surrendered to the truth that pursued him: the ultimate narrative about God’s creation, humanity’s rebellion, and the Savior’s sacrifice of love. God’s truth catches up to you sooner or later. It is steady and unrelenting because it is ever present. “Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen” (Rom. 1:20). God reveals Himself through nature, in the Bible, through believers, and by the Holy Spirit. He “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). That truth is a Person, Jesus. He is Truth worth surrendering to.