Found By the Hound of Heaven
A Testimony to the Relentlessness of Grace
LINDSAY HOLIFIELD / 5.1.24 (from mbird.com)
I can still hear my grandmother singing off-key Baptist hymns as she swayed through the hallways of her Mississippi home. My paternal grandparents were international missionaries in their younger years, but by the time my sister and I came along, they were better known for their home-grown peaches and black-eyed peas and a gumbo recipe that to this day, no one can seem to replicate. Most importantly, their home was the place of my grandmother’s famous late-night storytelling, which always left us doubled over in fits of laughter.
It was an eight-hour drive to this Mississippi home, so, twice a year, my parents dutifully packed a minivan and trekked to the little house with the giant moose head hanging over the television set and the terrifying taxidermized bear standing on his hind legs. If you asked my child-self where her favorite place in the whole world was, it was sitting on that quilted twin bed and listening to a master storyteller spin tales for her granddaughters. My grandmother had a god-like way of creating out of of the barren wasteland before her: where there was nothing, suddenly, laughter spilling over everywhere.
I start my tale here, because to tell you about my very non-traditional faith journey is to tell you about a God who, like my grandmother Jeanne, also weaves stories. In particular, it is to tell you about a masterful storyteller God who creates stunning aliveness out of barren wastelands.
I grew up in a form of Christianity that I would term religious fundamentalism: attempts to earn God’s favor through behavioral perfection, regular preparation for the end of the world, and a general conception of God as distant, capricious, and less than all-loving. As a teenager, I began to question the beliefs I’d been handed when my mental health took a turn for the worse.
“I pray that one day you would know that God is safe and that God is loving,” the woman said, with her hands gently placed on my shoulder. After growing up in an environment based in religious fear and shame, Mel was one of the first people in my life who told me, a self-hating sixteen-year-old, that I was loved unconditionally by God. As a therapist in a treatment facility for teenage girls with eating disorders, she began countering the narrative that I had been given that God’s love was given or withdrawn based on performance. The shame that I had carried with me did not immediately dissolve in that moment, but there was a seed planted of grace.
One particular morning, I was sitting outside watching the sunrise over the orange-blue desert mountains, and I realized that I didn’t know what I believed anymore. I’d spent so many years atoning for the weighty accusations of the law through self-starvation, but a lingering and sacred “what if” held me in the hope of possibility for another way.
During my time in college, I entered what many would now term “deconstruction” and joined a college ministry that had a heart for justice-seeking and those on the margins of society. But by the time I graduated and was admitted to master’s program in a divinity school, I found that I was doing mental gymnastics to recite creeds or sing worship songs. Finally, I admitted it to myself, just days before I began divinity school: Jesus was no longer a part of my belief system.
I began to visit a synagogue while attending classes in divinity school, and I dialogued regularly with kind, brilliant rabbis. It was healing to hear them talk of God’s lovingkindness and mercy throughout Torah. In those spaces, God began to heal some of the old images and models of him that I’d been given, and I began to trust this God to be loving. In that, my deepest childhood wounds began to find healing. In the fall of 2019, I formally converted to Judaism, and lived as a content Jewish woman for three years.
And I would have stayed there, had God not gently interrupted my journey in December of 2022. I reached out to a friend mid-December about some rumbling theological questions, but none of them pertained to Jesus. I don’t remember much of the conversation, only that she talked a little about her Christian beliefs. It wasn’t new information to me that she was a Christian, but for whatever reason, she unknowingly opened a floodgate with her words that day. What can I say, but that for the next three days, something would not let go of me. It was an intense pull, more than I’ve ever known, getting louder every day. I spent every second reading, listening, and researching. I spent every night in the darkness of my cramped closet praying. It was like the years of healing the old images I’d held of God culminated in this call — like God had to bring me out of the place of my painful childhood belief system to teach me that God actually loved me, and then gently bring me back to integrate the images of Jesus with the God I’d come to trust. Gentle, tender, compassionate: those weren’t “Jesus” words to me, but I’d come to know them as qualities of the God in whom I believed.
So, on the last Friday of December, I sat in my closet, and I said, “Okay, fine! Let up!” I believe God was gentle and tender in letting me begin to trust the person of Jesus, because my traumatized heart was very scared. I knew nothing theologically in that moment beyond the person of Jesus, but I also knew that everything had changed.
When I was in college, I had a painting professor who put her class of mostly 18-year-olds in front of an abstract piece of art, and asked us if it was art. When most of us skeptically said no and grumbled about how our 5-year-old niece could have made something better, she told us, in her elegant French accent, that we needed to “widen our eyes.” In the time since this unexpected conversion, God has been slowly widening my eyes. And the wider they get, the more I fall in love with the beauty of this story of grace.
I played no part in being “found” and thank God. I regularly tell people that I was not looking for Jesus. I was not reading about the historicity of Jesus and got convinced by the factual evidence, and neither was I trying to prove Christians wrong and somehow fell into faith. Against all odds, Jesus sought me out and that is the most strange and glorious thing I can tell you.
I was sitting in a small, cramped office in a treatment center in Texas and the woman across from me asked me what it was I saw myself doing with my life if I made it out of the eating disorder battle alive. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine life beyond those cold, clinical walls, beyond the feeding tube in my nose, beyond the monsters in my mind. The world seemed unimaginably bleak there. But as I write this in 2024 in Birmingham Alabama, years into recovery and with a peace that surpasses understanding, I can see a bit more clearly.
And what I can see is that I hope to continue to carry on my grandmother’s artistry through weaving stories about the grace of God. So come, gather round, and let me tell you about a life spent trying to achieve and earn love through behavioral perfection, and a life of self-destruction to atone when I inevitably failed at being perfect. But most importantly, let me tell you of the grace of a God who has already met the demands of the law with his own bloodied body. This is a God who plays the long-game in his seeking, and who weaves together beauty for his redemptive purposes. Let me tell you about the master storyteller.
My journey has been non-traditional in every sense of the word, but in many ways, my life story is an embodiment of the gospel. The demands of the law were met in Jesus: rejoice and rest in the good news!
Luke 19:10 . . . “For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”