We gathered this week, these brave women and me. These women who are pulling up their chairs,
opening up God’s book and questioning their theology and it’s relationship to
their own dailies. This road is not easy, this asking God to show Himself. Because He does, He delights in answering
that plea…and then…what do you do with that?
God I mean? When He reveals
Himself and truth that is so real that it wrestles you to the ground?
We planted our lives in Genesis
32 …
God?
He is full of loving-kindness and faithfulness.
He is the only source of true blessing.
He sometimes has to dislocate us to get us to the blessing.
He is quite big enough to handle our wrestling things out
with Him.
He is the one, after all, who initiates the wrestling match.
Jacob?
After wrestling through the night and in excruciating pain
from his hip being dislocated is asked to let go. But could he?
I imagine him clinging, using God just to stay upright and saying, “No!
I will not let you go until you bless me.”
What a picture to stay in a clinging position and say No, I will not let
you go in the midst of great pain and complete uncertainty. When asked, “what is your name”, what went
though his mind? His father had asked
him that same question some twenty years earlier and he lied! His name, Jacob, means supplanter, one who
takes what he wants using whatever means necessary to get it, by force and or
deception. He had lived up to his name
when God found him alone and cloaked in the darkness of night. In his mind did he attach his answer to what
he had done in the past or what he had become in the present? Don’t we?
How often do I indentify myself with my past mistakes or what I do, or
even successes? Jacob was given a new
name, a name that would identify him with God.
His life was preserved, snatched, delivered, and forever changed. Ours too upon the first encounter with God
and multiple days and wrestling encounters along the way. He is constantly wrestling
the old out of us so that we can embrace Him and our new name. Oh teach me to
live in His identification alone! Jacob
would walk the rest of his life with a limp as a result of the wrestling. A
constant reminder, step by step, of what God did on that day. What’s so wrong with a limp? I think we are so concerned that everyone
thinks we have it all together that we could never let someone see us limp. Truth?
What we really need to see is each other walking this thing called life,
this road full of joys, sorrows, pain, highs and lows, with a limp!
One step at a time.
Blessings,
Kim
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