The devotional book I’m using is this one here. I totally just grabbed it out of a pile. So much for prayful consideration! Today’s topic is labeled “Wrestling In the Night.” It tells of Jacob and the evening he spends wrestling a man/angel/God. It isn’t stated for fact (where is the bibliography from all these years ago…seriously!) that Jacob did indeed wrestle God but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest it. If it was God, he played Jacob a bit. He let him win until he used GodKungFu to disable him on a pressure point.
God allowed Jacob to flex his humanity but then quickly gave him a back of the head slap to remind him that yes indeed God is still God in these Old Testament parts. The part of this verse and the accompanying materials that caught my eye was where it talks about sitting quietly before God and taking in the wild atmosphere. As New Age-ey as that sounds (get thee behind me SAATAAN!) focusing on The Lord does take some pretty unique and what some would call eccentric steps.
The entire purpose of when I started doing this devotion thing (and stopped, started and did that dance three times over) was to wrestle with God in a similar fashion. A relationship with God is not about getting it right every day and every way. It’s about exploring where you’re fall short and where you rock the casbah…and then working through all of that with prayer, bible study and even worship. It’s about constantly being under construction and knowing your personal Jesus Scaffolding is going to be up and around your heart, soul, mind and body for just about eternity.
Jacob didn’t appear to know that it was God until the hip touch and name change. Have you ever fallen into a God moment where you stop and realize that indeed you just got hit with some Holy Spirit Spankings? I can claim those moments on a hand or two very clearly. Most of the time wrestling with God results in these moments where you have an “Ah-ha!” experience.
It also lends itself to the question of what we want from God. A sentence in the “pray” section dwells on me praying and telling God what I want. I’m conflicted here because I’ve been raised on the “Want/Need” train and this comes directly back to me in this moment. I’m not sure if God is a God of Need or Want. I know he wants our heart, our prayers and our salvation. But who am I to tell the Lord what I want? Shouldn’t I be asking him for what I need? I need stability in life. I need strength in living in the world. I need to find fellow men in my community to fellowship. I need to find a Godly woman to spend the rest of my life with and to save the world with.
Ok, so that last part is more of a want than a need.
Does this make any sense to anyone out there? Or am I just some crazy Christian slowly losing it on the fringes of religiosity?
It makes total sense to me and much of it could have been written by me as well, except for the fact that my writing has been reduced to tweets of late. Motivation, I lack it.
For me, I want to want to only want what I need, and for that to be in line with God’s will. What I do seems to be to pray for guidance and strength, but I suck at listening for that guidance. I get frustrated with myself and want to say, well, I won’t type that out, but I want to give up. But that’s not what God wants for his children. So I keep trying, and with God’s help, which may be with the “GodKungFu” touch, the flesh will be overcome by the spirit.