The following is an Advent devotion I wrote for my church. It is based on Psalm 146: 5-10.
It is the children’s Bible, the one I’ve had since I was around seven, that I turned to find the story of God wrestling with Jacob.
I attempted to search for it in my big Bible, but other than the Old Testament, I didn’t know where to begin looking. I remember the picture from my children’s Bible – both God and Jacob’s muscles flexed, legs and arms intertwined, Jacob cowering and confused, but defending himself. God is seemingly emotionless. The moon is full. They’re battling on a mountain.
I want to know more about this wrestling because I can’t get past the first verse in my assigned Psalm for this Advent devotion: “Blessed is the one whose help is in the God of Jacob.”
The God who Jacob cried out for help, and who hours later started a middle of the night throw down in response? How was that helpful?
I’m ashamed to write how many times I’ve attempted to write a message of Advent from these verses; how many pages in my journal I’ve filled trying to tie in the words, “possibility,” and “hope.” My last entry ended this way: I can no longer write.
But I’m looking at my children’s Bible and re-reading the story to see if there’s something – anything – that will give me a way in. I’m so close to the words I can smell the pages and I think they smell like my childhood home, but I don’t have anything to say about being blessed because God might wrestle us all someday.
A few hours later, I’m in a second grade classroom during a Reader’s Workshop. Today’s question to guide students as they read is: What is a lesson a character learns that I can apply to my own life?
I think of Jacob and this line from his story: “Jacob fought back with all his strength….he knew that if he gave up, he would die.”
I consider how terrified I’d be if I was grabbed in the middle of the night, or anytime for that matter. What would I do? Would I fight back? Would I have the strength to?
I look around the classroom I’m in. The whiteboards are now placeholders, no longer used for instruction, rather for colorful posters, calendars, and the day’s “I can” statements. “I can write many forms of poetry.”
What if I can’t, but I want to try anyway? What if I spend every day for the rest of my life writing and it comes to nothing save for finding the words to name what aches, what brings joy, so that I can contend with it?
Once, someone asked me how I knew God was calling me to write. I said I don’t know, and more, I don’t think God really cares if I write or not, but I know when I do, He is with me on the page.
He’s with me in the struggle, that is. Once I’ve won the battle, once that essay, blog post, book, this devotion, is published, the sun rises, and He walks away. His back is turned, and I am vacant, exhausted, confused. It is only when I pick my pen up again that He comes back. I write not because I feel called, but because I believe that if I give up, something inside me will die.
I wonder now if hope and possibility feel like a wrestling match. I wonder if that’s what being blessed is all about.
Come, Lord Jesus. Make it so we are all forever walking differently.
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