I have a slightly different understanding because of the way I have experienced God, even while I was still running from Him in disobedience, rebellion, and defiance. I consider myself to have been lost at that time from my present perspective, but God knew exactly where I was. This was quite a few years ago, when I was thirty three years old. My marriage had broken down following two first-trimester miscarriages, and a still birth that occurred less than two weeks before the nuptials. I also had a lot of baggage from my past that I had been unable to deal with/put "closure" on.
It was around Passover in 1988, and a neighborhood evangelical Christian church was showing a movie on the life of Christ based on the Gospel of Luke. I had been brought up in a fairly strict religious environment but did not know Jesus, and was curious, and living in a world of unremitting emotional pain, so I went. As I sat in that church after seeing the first or second part of that movie, I am not sure at what point the following happened: my whole body was filled with the Light of God's unconditional love and forgiveness for me and all I had done, all the ways I had messed up my life, all my failures and mistakes, all of it bathed in the Light of His absolute understanding of how and why I had become the person I was, all of it bathed in the Light of His unconditional love and total forgiveness. I wept. I felt so broken and so lost and so unredeemable, but most of all I felt unworthy. And of course I am unworthy.
Even after that, oh yes, it was a cherished experience to know that God loved me, but even after that I did not believe in "that" God. I had begun a spiritual seeking phase, and carried on in that for another fifteen years or so until God clearly called me out of what I was doing, for I was a professionally practicing pagan, putting the life of my very soul in danger. And yes, even after that, even after that clear calling out, my stiff-necked stubbornness was so set against Him it took another year following the calling out for me to surrender my life to Him.