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"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years." Those words begin Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven." Thompson sketches the drama of God pursuing a soul. In that poem Francis Thompson may have been telling his own story. Born in 1859, at Lancashire in northern England, he intended to be a priest, but his physician-father urged him to study medicine. Unable to pass his exams, he went to London, in 1885, where he lived as a tramp and a drug addict. He earned a little money fetching cabs and selling matches. In 1887, he sent some poems he wrote to Wilfred and Alice Meynell, editors of a magazine. They befriended him and helped him to overcome his addiction to opium. In his most godless moments, Thompson still felt hounded and hunted down by God. He wrote his great poem "The Hound of Heaven," after meditating on these words from Psalm 23: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

In ancient Israel, a shepherd went ahead of his sheep and his dogs brought up the rear. The dogs' main business was to keep the sheep together. If a sheep fell behind, tempted by some attractive wayside plant, the dogs who followed the flock hounded the sheep back where he belonged. With marvelous insight, old King David, the author of Psalm 23, portrayed God's goodness and mercy as the dogs that hunt us down and hound us back to the true paths. In recent times, Dr. Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, has likewise recognized this need for stimulus and challenge to move a person to develop his God-given potential. Goodness and mercy hunts us out of our laziness, our trifling, our search for selfish pleasures. God will not give up on us! God's hounds bark behind us and, as Francis Thompson wrote in the final words of his poem, God himself beckons before us: "Rise, clasp My hand and come!"