There are quite a lot of variations of this, a very famous one is the Francis Thompson poem, 'The Hound of Heaven':
I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Another famous one is the poem 'The Collar' by George Herbert, '('I struck the board, and cried, no more, I will abroad ...').
Some of them are very well expressed, but they don't really add much to any arguments. Unless you are going to say that everyone is running away from God, well, you can't prove that they aren't! Is that a phallusy?
How I see running away from God, is when your conscience is nagging at you and tells you something needs to be set right and you want to avoid doing so.
It's all the little avenues and avoidances that you tell yourself to justify not doing it.
This comes from the idea that God is actually that little voice that tells you to face up to whatever it is that needs doing.
In the bible, Jonah " ran away from God".
That's how I've always seen it.
It's a sort of "round tuit " things that nag you!
Like that.
We probably all have those, I know I do.
Like I should be doing housework instead of chattering on the Internet
So maybe everyone is running away from things they feel they should be doing.
