Moral of the week: It’s okay to struggle with God. In fact, the Bible is full of lively encounters with God – negotiations, laments, indignation, door-slamming fights. And guess what? God doesn’t go away. God hangs in, stays with, sometimes appears to change course (or was that the plan all along?).
In other words, God is revealed as One who loves – actively, passionately, fully. And those whom God seems to choose for special blessing or purpose are often far from perfect – but they are open to a robust relationship with God.
One of these was Jacob, the wily grandson of Abraham, twin of Esau, who managed to secure both his brother’s birthright and their father Isaac’s blessing. The tales of his adventures, marriages, schemes, setbacks and successes is richly told in Genesis 25-33. One such story comes up Sunday.
Toward the end of his life, Jacob is returning home with his vast family and flocks, and he hears Esau is still looking for him. Fearful, he prepares to encounter the twin he cheated so long ago. He sends his family and everything he owns on ahead. The storyteller is succinct: “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” We don’t know who the adversary is, but Jacob holds his own and at daybreak the man wants to leave. But Jacob is tough; he won’t release him until he receives a blessing.
The man tells him, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Imagine that! The very name of the nation that will bear God’s blessing means “has striven with God” or “prevails with God.” Talk about an invitation.
Are there issues in your life you want to take up with God? Times when you have struggled with God? Did you wrestle through to a place of resolution – or is it still locked away in you, holding you back from true intimacy in faith? Bring it out! God doesn’t want us to be polite – God wants us to be real. I hear God say, “Bring it! All of it. I love who you are. I want you to be true before me.”
And if we’re really open in this relationship, we might also find our desires or demands changing, as we are shaped by our encounters with the Holy One. That is the goal of the spiritual life: to become ever more truly who we are, who God made us to be. In the process, we shed some of who we’re not.
I once heard about a little girl who used to stop on her way to school and watch a sculptor fashioning a statue of a lion from a block of marble. Week after week she watched as the animal took shape. When it was nearly finished, she stopped to look one day, and said to the sculptor, “Hey, mister, how’d you know there was a lion in there?”
God knows who we are. As we allow ourselves to struggle with God – and to rest in God – we allow all that is not truly “us” to be chiseled away, until we stand in our truest identity, fully known, truly loved. Sometimes at that point God gives us a new name, our true name.
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