"Life is difficult." With these three words, Scott Peck began The Road Less Traveled, a book that would help launch the burgeoning market for self-help literature in the 1980s. Perhaps you've read it. I certainly have, and its foundational claim that accepting life's challenges helps us transcend them continues to feed my own spiritual journey.
By this point in our story, Jacob well knows Scott Peck's truth. Even with God's blessing secured, he's fought, manipulated, and negotiated his way through relationships and resources. True, the "difficulty" Jacob has encountered has been largely of his own making—whose isn't?—but for him, the struggle seems to be a way of life.
That's why this story of his midnight wrestling match proves so iconic. Psychoanalysts in our midst, I suspect, will have a heyday with a story of Jacob's anxieties writ large in the dark of night. But as one who's had her own midnight wrestling matches, I simply offer a few thoughts about the intersection between Jacob's story and my own.
First, notice that earlier in the chapter, Jacob's desperate prayer for protection combines a reminder of God's promises and, for the first time, an acknowledgement of Jacob's unworthiness (32:10). I recognize this odd equation in my own life: When I'm utterly humbled, then I can wallow in God's transforming grace.
Second, the struggle itself is not pretty, nor without lasting consequence. But Jacob's limp introduces a permanent reminder of his vulnerability. Life is difficult indeed, especially in the dark of night. But it is there that I learn once again that "when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:9-10).
- With whom or what do you find yourself in deepest struggle? Where is God in that struggle?
- When has your own vulnerability opened you to the power of God at work in your life?
- What other details did you notice in today's reading?
Prayer: Thank you, O God, for the gift of your power in our weakness. As we meet the daily difficulties that life brings, may we sense you at work in our unworthiness and inadequacy. Amen.
Breath Prayer: Unless // you bless.
