This winter I wrestled with God. As the wild evening winds tore at the facade of my monastic guest room atop the Mount of Olives, I stretched my hands out across the cold tile floor and listened–rain pounding against dusty windows, the buzz of my tiny space heater…and sobs like a drowning man’s angry lungs scrambling for life.
Looking back on these past four months I realize that God has quite assuredly set me up. In my mind I had assumed that I was in control: booking tickets, enrolling in classes, raising support, and packing up my townhome.
I was wrong.
I was Jacob: a deceiver having stolen that which does not belong to me (in my case, a deep-seated sense of self-sufficiency).
The heart is deceitful [Jacob] above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
God cast me out from Paddan-Aram, from the land I’d grown accustomed to. Like Jacob, I drove my heart hard toward Gilead, putting a multitude of miles between myself and any semblance of familiarity.
I gave God space, space to meet me. Like Jacob, I sent my people, possessions, familiarities on ahead until nothing but me, my Maker, and Jerusalem’s cold winter rains remained.
En route to Beersheba, Jacob stopped at a place that was called Mahanaim “two camps”.
The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone (Gen. 32:22-24a).
All alone, under the devastating night that swallows up the foothills of the Transjordan mountains like death in war, Jacob welcomed wandering beasts, shivering cold, and violent raiders. Why?
While Jacob’s motivations for sending his family and possessions on ahead of him were certainly ignoble (as perhaps mine were), God was using Jacob’s cowardice as a means of driving two worlds together. Jacob had become a wealthy, semi-nomadic sheep breeder; however, his success was built upon the sandy foundation of him living out his namesake: Jacob: “deceiver”. Under the hushed moonlight reflecting off the Jabbok River’s rolling back, Jacob realized his need for a reckoning. Before he met his brother Esau, before returning home to reclaim his inheritance, Jacob needed to shed the cloak of his heritage. He needed a new name.
And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day has broken.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then he said, ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed’ (Gen. 32:24-28).
The identity of the man Jacob strives with remains covered under a cloak of mystery. The Hebrew name the man gives himself is eloheim, which can refer to either a singularity or plurality (“god” or “gods”). We have no idea what the name Israel really means. This passage suggests that it is derivative of the Hebrew verb sarah which means “perseverance” or “persistence”. Whatever the case, a fundamental change takes place.
I believe that all of life is a grand invitation. We are welcomed into the courts of contention, beckoned by the Creator to wrestle with Him so that we might receive a new name. Why consider throwing down with the King of Kings? Because, if we’re honest, each of us have a sense that who we are is not who we’re meant to be. We live and breathe broken names: “deceiver”, “addict”, “failure”; and when we are finally willing to say, “enough” God leads us to the riverside, provides spaces like the top of the Mount of Olives, and wrestles with us.
Jacob “persisted” through the angry hours of the night, peering into the darkest parts of his heart. He earned his new name. As the breaking dawn began to light up the river like an oil lamp, I imagine Jacob, Israel, seeing a different man as staring back at him through the Jabbok’s rushing waters.
Healed and wounded: Israel greets morning with a limp. Jacob’s fight illuminates the paradox of the spiritual life. We are simultaneously broken and mended.
The narrative closes with one of the most poetic images in the Bible,
So Jacob called the name of the place Penuel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip (32:31-32).
Old westerns depict the hero wandering with something like a swagger into the sunset. Jacob got it backwards. Sunrise is likened to the face of God, and as the awe-full beauty of Him rose upon Israel, the new man stumbled out of the canyon with a limp: broken and reborn.
I cried for two straight months. My evening rhythm began with the curtain falling early on those winter afternoons. As the last thread of light tore and fell away below the horizon, I’d think about dinner, cook a modest meal, write about the day’s adventures, and by 7:30pm, retire to Penuel, where tears would always fall. When I couldn’t cry any longer, I would sleep. Each morning I woke with a limp.
Jacob’s legacy, the place called Israel, is sending me home with two profound gifts: a new name and a permanent limp. My narrative, Lord willing, will conclude with a familiar refrain:
So Bryan called this land Israel, saying, ‘God has led me here to teach me how to wrestle. I have welcomed God, and He has both wounded and healed me.’ The sun rose as he boarded his plane, limping because of his hip, weeping because of his God.
