Fearful Farewells; Fearful Homecomings

Genesis 31:1-33:20:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2031:1-33:20%20&version=NIV1984.

            Jacob’s bad behavior continues.  Notice that in Genesis 31:20 Jacob deceives Laban yet again.  He’s having a hard time learning!  The result of such bad behavior is that Jacob lives a life marked by fear.  He is afraid of his father-in-law; he is afraid of his brother.

            I think that bears reflection.  How often is it that our fears reveal more about us than they do about our circumstances?  I’m not suggesting that life doesn’t throw us unexpected curve balls.  It certainly does.  But isn’t it often the case that our response to those curve balls is dictated by our own sense of shortcomings?  It’s been 27 years this month that my father passed away.  And I sometimes blame him for bequeathing me a lifetime of uncertainty about my own cardiac health.  On the other hand, the fear I live with about those health issues has less to do with his early passing and more to do with my own nagging feeling that I don’t do enough to protect my health.  I eat too much and exercise too little.  Who’s fault is it really if I’m afraid?

            Then, Genesis 32:22-32 gets to the heart of the matter.  Jacob’s life has been a lifetime of wrestling, struggling with the Lord and His will.  God gives Jacob two reminders of that struggle:  a new name (Israel means ‘wrestle/struggles with God’) and a limp.  From now on, whenever someone addresses him and whenever he takes a step, he’ll have these two reminders of what has really been at stake.

            We should learn to see our scars that way, too.  Sometimes those scars are physical.  Sometimes they’re psychic, that is, living in our souls.  Wherever they reside, whether inside or out, they are reminders of hard won wisdom and revelations of the road yet ahead, as we struggle to become the people the Lord has called us to be.

            Interestingly, there’s no dramatic moment of change for Jacob.  He is and will be Israel, the one who struggles with God.  Even in the tragic trick that his sons play on him in the matter of Joseph (Genesis 37, which we’re scheduled to read Monday), Jacob is not the innocent victim.  The father so victimized by his sons is the son who victimized his own brother and father and who showed such favoritism to his own son.

            So perhaps we should learn, too, that there won’t be a moment when we ‘arrive,’ when we have God’s will sorted out.  Perhaps we should learn to content ourselves with that phrase I dropped last week, “a long obedience in the same direction.”  Arrival depends on the Lord; but walking the long road of discipleship—we accomplish that every day, one small, struggling step at a time.