The story of Jacob wrestling with God tells the unsettling, yet reassuring story that out of our deepest struggles come the greatest blessings. Jacob wrestled with God all night, and only after God dislocated Jacob's hip, an injury with which he limped the rest of his life, did he receive the blessings of God he so deeply wanted.
The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, financial disaster, the failure of a marriage, a life-threatening illness; all of these and many more events may impose painful experiences that cripple us for the rest of our lives. But in the healing of time, like Jacob, we may realize that without those scars, we would never have entered into a new relationship of blessings with God.
As Nathan Nettleton put it: "And many of us, too, can witness that our greatest blessings and our deepest scars came from one and the same experience."
He continued, "...the events that inflict upon us wounds that leave us limping for the rest of our lives have at times been the events that we also look back at with a measure of gratitude for the way they have reshaped us and borne fruits of grace within us that would not otherwise have been possible. And as we recognize that we often see in those same events the unmistakable fingerprints of God, if not in the causing of the events, then at least in the ways they were utilized in our lives. Am I right?"
Up until the all night struggle with God, Jacob was a rascal! Hardly a paragon of virtue, he tricked, deceived, and cheated his way through life; betraying his own father and brother. But after the struggle, in which he became broken for life, Jacob became a new man; blessed by God and able to bring healing to the broken relationships in his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment