The wind was wild and the sun was strong. “Just one,” I asked. “Let me see just one bird of prey—one red-tail today.”

It is March, freshly born in eastern Pennsylvania. We started walking—me with quickening strides, and the dog trotting with his ears dragging on the weathered gray pavement, riven and cracked like tired skin.

The sun was so confident in the wind, piercing the cloud linings and turning their middles gray-purple. The expanse seemed white-washed in glory, blue but blinding. The cornfields at the end of the street were just ahead, fully open to the waves of the wind, forming an altar for holy wandering. As we approached, the entire landscape felt like a surf. Breaker upon breaker. The waves in the trees. The waves in the grass. The waves on my bearded face. The waves tossing the coal-black crows. Wave upon wave of this . . . wildness.

There we were, looking out into the fields from the end of the street. A hundred yards out, a congregation of large birds drifted and fell like bits of paper in the golden sea of old cut corn stalks. The sun was staring down hard at them, polishing the flat surface of stalk and grass, making treasure from forgotten stories.

“Turkey vultures,” I huffed at first. “Of course.” But then came the noble screams. And when the birds floated up on the thermals, like consonants in the voweled wind, I saw the cream underbellies and the blood-red tail feathers catching the sun. Five. Six. Seven. Eight of them! Tusseling and tagging each other, playing in the waves, stretching their arms out to let the gift of the gold day lift them heavenward.

I raised my arms, so envious. Did they see me—a bipedal creature bound to the ground and gawking at them? I thought then that maybe as I dreamed of flying, caught up in the clouds, they dreamed of running on two long legs, stomping the earth instead of soaring over it.

This was a jeweled moment, a time to stop and stay. And so we watched the red-tails play, sweeping with their wings at the waves of wind and floating up on thermals, then back down, then up again. I wondered if the neighbors would notice me standing at the roadside—a man and his basset hound—looking out into the fields as if caught by a window into eternity. I didn’t care. Perhaps it was. Perhaps heaven is precisely the place where men fly and red-tails run, where things are turned upside down for a glorious unending afternoon, as breakers roll over the altar-fields. Heaven, I know, will be a place of wind—the four winds. That was given to the prophets (Jer. 49:36; Ezek. 37:9; Dan. 7:2, 8:8; Zech. 2:6; Matt. 24:31; Mark 13:27; Rev. 7:1). Wind from all directions, wind from the ever-moving, immovable God.

The hawks got word we were creeping around. One by one, they lifted, screeched, and left, happily taken up in their vortex to the sun-stained clouds. They looked lordly in the sharp breeze, with the light hanging on their chests.

The dog and I walked on. “Eight! Eight—and we asked for one!” My eyes opened wide and scanned the sky, watching for their tiny silhouettes far out in the expanse. My heart thudded like a drum. I could not take it all in, but I kept trying. Everywhere I turned, life was pulsing in the roaring wind. God had left all the windows open in heaven’s house. It was too much—gloriously too much.

For the next few minutes, I’m not sure whether we walked or levitated. But we moved fast around the next neighborhood, kicking the gravel and rushing back towards the cornfields. Would they still be there? Would they be playing again in the winded waves?

No. They were gone. And I was glad. Jeweled moments cannot linger. They cost too much and are too rare to capture. In the wildness of God, they are given, and then they are gone. Mostly, we miss them. But not this day. Not this day, with the raging wind and golden fields and red-tails carousing like kings. This moment I was given—a belated gift from the Spirit of God, the Spirit of life, the one Francis Thompson called the Hound of Heaven.

My heart was burning, burning so fiercely it was hard to breathe.

I thought then of those holy words men spoke as the Son of God told them stories from the beginning of the world: “Did not our hearts burn within us?” (Luke 24:32) My heart was burning, burning so fiercely it was hard to breathe.

There is a good burning by a holy God. And we so often forget it. That burning marks us—consumes us like flame does an old newspaper. The fire and smoke inside us make us lose our lungs for a moment. But for all the ecstasy, it is not the feeling that we want most, an experience we chase. Some, of course, will chase the feeling and forget the voice that calls behind it. No—it is not the feeling we’re after, but the Face, what Jacob called Peniel (Gen. 32:30), the face of God. We are all faces longing with furrowed brows for God’s Face—ocean-grand and galaxy-deep. By so bold and terrifying a beauty we want to be seen, and we want to see. Heaven is forever with a Face. It is, as one theologian put it, “a beautiful place because it is inhabited by a beautiful person.”

What do you chase? What do you long to look at?

I still chase red-tails. Maybe I’m just a boy who never gave up the dream of flying. Maybe I long for the weightless drift they enjoy with outstretched arms—effortless travel. Maybe I think it would be easier to don feathers instead of skin, to be clothed in something perfectly crafted for the wind. But no matter how many red-tails I see, it is never enough . . . because there is a hidden Face behind them, too broad and beautiful to take in. It is the Face we are made to chase, the Peniel.

It is a good thing to long for heaven as you stand on the earth, staring at birds that beckon you higher. It is a good thing to long for holy burning. But better still to seek the Face of the one we’re born to chase. Heaven will not just be a place where men fly and red-tails run. It will be a house for the Face we chase, beyond the high hawks and roaring wind and piercing sun—a house for the Face we long to look into.

That is why we hope every moment to see and be seen. That is why our lives are dim mirrors, even at their brightest. That is why we lean each morning and evening toward holy sight: face to Face (1 Cor. 13:12), made to Maker, eyes to Eyes.

Heaven will not just be a place where men fly and red-tails run. It will be a house for the Face we chase.

We are so taken by hawks and heaven, by things and places. But the Face—what about Him? What of the One who is looking at us, at this very moment, with a love so fierce it would rend the earth in half?

What if we, like the birds, received the hollow bones of heaven by faith, and chased the holy Face, leaving all else behind? “Just one,” we would say. “Let me see just the one God. Let me see his eyes.”

And who could stop us? Not “death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation” (Rom. 8:38–39). We would be invincible. We would be chasers. And the red-tails would be right to run behind us.

Heaven is the Face we chase, my friends. And it sees us. And one day, we will see.

* * *

The Red-Tail

A redtail caught in an updraft
writes out his circles for me,
steady and slow.
He’s opened himself up,
hollow bones floating
in the hollows of the sky.
Only blue is at his back.
He has everything
because he has nothing.
I want his kingly poverty,
and I beg
in the deafening wind.
I would give my money,
my home,
my clothes,
to be that poor and free.

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