All Night, Wrestling

Some nights I am Jacob, wrestling with God. 

On the edge of fear and despair, at the end of himself, alone, desperate, he realizes the shadowy figure he is wrestling with is God Himself. I feel Jacob’s desperation: I won’t let you go unless you bless me! 

Such a strange story, yet I peer into it and see my reflection. I lay awake for hours, blood raging, pounding on the chest of the One who has the power to act, but isn’t. Why aren’t you doing something? Why aren’t you changing this? How many prayers do I have to pray before something happens? 

Enough is enough. A God with power wouldn’t allow this injustice to continue. A God who cares would take this burden off my friend. A God who sees would heal that wound in my child.

The unanswered prayers linger large in the room, their weight keeping me awake. I threaten God: Answer! If you don’t come through on this one, it will weaken my faith. And it will be your fault. 

Somebody on Twitter wrote something like, “Am I depressed or just having an appropriate response to all the horrible things happening in the world?” If I knew the person who tweeted that, I would give her a fist bump. If I was the sort of person who gave fist bumps. 

I watch those tossing their faith over their shoulder and think about how easy that seems. What if I chose not to believe anymore? To give up on prayers, to take the darkness at face value? I gingerly pick up the idea, hold it at arm’s length, examine it from all angles. What is the point of this wrestling? Wouldn’t it be easier just to give in, walk away? 

In the night, I remember how Lance would say, “How much evil is too much evil?” I was 21, it was a Friday night, and I was sitting on the blue carpeted floor of Lance and Suzanne’s house, crowded with 25 other college students. He continued, “People always say, ‘I can’t believe in God because there is so much evil in the world.’ But how much is too much? Would we be okay with one abused child, one natural disaster, one drug cartel, as long as everything else was well and good? Where do we draw the line when we say, ‘I’d only believe in God if less evil existed?’”

It’s a good question. God told us this world would be broken, by our own doing. Yet we keep grasping for heaven as if it’s owed us. 

In the night, I flip that coin over to the other side and ask myself, “How many answered prayers would be enough for me to have faith?” I open my eyes and look around at all the answers surrounding me, gifts that were once prayers: My husband, next to me for 22 years. Each of my four children, sleeping in their beds. This home, miraculously granted. Gil’s job. My job. Each wrestled over in those dead-of-night prayers. These are just the ones within arm’s reach. If I stretched beyond, how many more would fill the pages of my life? 

Yet I want more, more, more yeses. Those in the past are not enough for me to trust you. I need more. I need this one, this time, this place. This one is now the most important. Just because God brought me out of slavery in Egypt doesn’t mean I can trust Him to take care of me in the desert. 

How easily I forget. 

Then Job answered the Lord: “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.”

After his night of wrestling, Jacob walked away with a limp. Blessed, but with a limp. Or maybe, could the blessing be in the limp itself? I can’t be God. I can’t overtake Him. I can’t make Him into my own image. I can’t force Him to conform to my will. Is this awareness the real blessing? 

Madeline L’Engle wrote, “The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men. Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

A speaker at our church, Daniel Kim, taught me that Psalms of lament and Psalms of thanksgiving are cyclical. They give birth to each other. Each time lament turns to thanksgiving, I build history with God. 

I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” I say to myself. No wonder the Bible is full of people talking to themselves. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. They weren’t good at remembering either. Remembering must be deliberate. 

The path behind me is not always the one I begged for. Still, it’s paved with Ebenezer stones, each inscribed with “Thus far has the Lord helped me.” Some were placed easily, joyfully. Others slowly, reluctantly – only after wrestling, sweat-stained and limping. The longer the path behind me becomes, the more hope takes shape ahead of me.