following hard

I have a song that I have adopted as my theme for this season of life.
I've sang it, cried it, hummed it
and whispered it while rocking my boys to sleep.
It is my anthem on the ragged days of Christ following.

Give me one pure and holy passion
Give me one magnificent obsession
Give me one glorious ambition in my life
To know and follow hard after you

To know and follow hard after you
To walk as your disciple in the truth
This world is empty pale and poor
Compared to knowing you my Lord
So lead me on and I will run after you
Lead me on and I will run after you.

The other day Scott told me that he would like
a new Hebrew-Greek Study Bible.
He is far more spiritual than I....
I usually tell him I would like new flip-flops or a night out.
But I picked up his old Study Bible and saw, by chance,
that another word for "follow hard" is "cleave" or "cling".
In Psalm 63:8, (Amplified version) it says -
My whole being follows hard after You and clings closely to You;
Your right hand upholds me.
Bible detective that I am, I went on line and looked it up in The Message -
I love the way Eugene Peterson shapes words...
Psalms 63:8 reads like this.
I hold on to you for dear life,
and you hold me steady as a post.
And my gut knows this to be true, in all the crazy, in all the madness,
the hard following has looked a lot more like grabbing on to Jesus
and holding on for dear life.
It hasn't been Jesus, elusive, out in front,
beckoning but I'm not sure what he's saying.
Or me running, out of breath, trying to keep up.
I'm clinging to him like super glue and he is holding me steady,
rock that he is.
Even when life is so up and down and not what I expected,
if I can just get my arms around him, he will hold me fast.
And that's something worth singing about.