Wrestling

I read about a man of questionable character who wrestles with God. There’s trouble behind and trouble ahead, and Jacob is caught in one of those back-against-the-wall places where there’s nowhere left to turn. He spends a long, dark, and sleepless night at the end of himself.

Dawn breaks on a day he’s been dreading, and he’s afraid. Bless me! He cries out because he has nothing left of his own to get him through it. And suddenly he sees it.

Jacob, the deceiver (for that is the meaning of his name), encounters the divine and comes away changed. He forever walks with a limp to remind him of the all-night tussle when God changed his name. A deceiver no longer, Jacob becomes Israel (God fights) and an entire nation and a people will come through him.

Later, I stand at the bathroom the mirror blow drying my hair while pondering a nagging something; I think about Jacob and how (in the words of Wm. Paul Young in The Shack) God is especially fond of those willing to wrestle and ruminate, the ruffians and the rascals—the ones he calls Beloved.

Me. And you.

And I think there’s great wisdom in the willingness to struggle and grapple and question. And I know that the moment I choose to rest in complacency or believe all my questions are answered and tied up with a bow is the day I will be the biggest fool of all.