Quidditch and Faith

Why Harry Potter is not adverse to Christianity:
How Quidditch can be used as an analogy.

I am currently reading The Call by Os Guiness. He discusses how we are called first to seek God and our secondary calling is our vocation. He uses the term seekers for people seeking God. As Harry Potter fan, this naturally made me think of the game of Quidditch in which Harry plays Seeker. The Seeker’s job is to search for the Snitch which will end the game and earn his/her team 150 points. In the same manner are we seeking God.
However, I realized that this cannot be right. We are not seeking God to win a mere 150 points and God is not running from us. The whole difficulty of catching the Snitch is that it is elusive and does not want to be caught. God is not at all like that. God seems to continually hound us. When I know I am sinning and I try to rationalize it, I usually then realize that God knows exactly what is going through my head. He knows I am trying to get out of holding myself accountably. Despite how I try to pretend that it does not matter and I can ask for forgiveness later, I know that that is not how it should work at all. God is continually working on my heart to mold me to become more like him. He does not leave me alone and he does not run from me.
Imagine all the stories you hear about the people who try so hard to believe God does not exist and how they are dragged kicking and screaming to believe that he does. A great example is CS Lewis. He used to be an atheist and he became one of the great Christian thinkers of our day. He wrote books such as The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia. Those books and movies are so well known that the word Narnia doesn’t even come up on my computer screen as being misspelled even though there isn’t a definition in my online dictionary. How amazing is God that he can take a resolute atheist and change his heart to influence others for God to the extent that Lewis did?
Returning to my Quidditch analogy, therefore, I came to the conclusion that God cannot be the snitch because I am not doing all the work to seek him. I may be a Seeker, but he wants me to find him. So perhaps the better analogy would be that I am a Seeker and God is a bludger. Unlike the elusive snitch, the bludger repeatedly comes at you, never stopping. It may hurt very badly to get hit, but it’s part of life and the pain can bring you back to God.
I recently read The Problem With Pain which is also by CS Lewis. It is a book that I highly recommend. In the book, Lewis discusses how pain can be a reminder that earth is not heaven. Though we may enjoy our time here on earth, we are destined for something far greater than this life. We will find a pain-free, everlasting life with God our father in heaven. The pain we experience on earth can be our saving grace when it reminds us of what we have to look forward to after this life.
As Os Guiness writes in The Call, “We not only have Jesus’ explicit promise that seekers will find (“seek and you will find”), but we also have his direct example to show that seekers themselves are sought” (16). God is not an elusive God who gets kick out of watching you jump through hoops to find him. Instead he is searching harder for you more than you can ever search for him.