004. The Art of Wrestling
Hey you,
I read recently about the crazy tale of Jacob and Esau, focusing at the point where Jacob’s trickster ways catch up to him as he is coming home to put himself under the mercy of his brother.
On the way he wrestles all night with a man he does not know. Wrestling wrestling wrestling to the point where finally day breaks and the man asks to be let go, and Jacob says, “not until you bless me.”
Jacob, you already got the birthright. What’s going on, man? I can only think of two reasons. One is that he was about to meet a brother he had gone through treachery and deceit to betray and rob. If you’ve already stolen one blessing there’s no end point. At some point that blessing must have more sacrificed to it in order to stay viable. In one sense a birthright is a birthright, but in that culture and time even Jacob knew that maybe it would protect him, but it wouldn’t protect all those under his care. That’s the nature of making choices to benefit yourself. Someone near you always suffers.
The other reason that I thought of is that Jacob was tired of his trickster nature. He was tired of cunning, sleuthing and scheming to stay ahead of the game. He was tired of grasping heels. When the man asked him who he was he replied with the only name he had known all his life, Jacob.
Here is where we get a clue who really wrestled with Jacob because no other random man would have had the power to rename him. He told him he would be called Israel, “for you have striven with God and men and prevailed.” (ESV)
He had a new identity and a new limp. Both which would change the shape of his generations forever.
Who strives with God? Later on in Job the might of God is made clear. In fact, it’s everywhere. How could a mere man struggle, and prevail?
This morning I was reading in Job after a rough few weeks. It hasn’t helped that I’ve been sick for longer than I’m ever used to being sick, but if I am honest the heart problem is that I’m jaded that I will ever get a happy life. Disenchanted with myself. Weary beyond knowledge. What’s the point of coming back around and believing that life is golden and beautiful? Wonder is a core component to who I am and without it nothing seems to have any worth. I know that this is likely the by-product of both trauma and a breakup and that most people only deal with those things one at a time, if they ever have to deal with them at all, but there are plenty of people who deal with more. The trouble is, that this is both a scant comfort or a kick in the butt to get going. I just don’t care. My own trouble is enough for me, there isn’t much space to think of other people’s troubles unless they are close to me.
In the middle of all this, meeting God in the mornings has been a struggle. He and I have a little routine. I make coffee and climb into my Chair of Provision (yes, I have to “climb” into it because it’s so big and I’m really quite small) and then we hang out. It’s been the thing which keeps me going. I have little else I care about in life right now aside from staying in reasonably good health, going to work, keeping up with my closest friends, and making sure the house doesn’t fall apart — the one thing I look forward to unreservedly is that 20 minutes or so with God. But sometimes my troubles go over me like the waves and breakers David likes to talk about and I don’t want to spend precious time being a complainer. I kind of dread meeting him with my head hung, which must be how Adam and Eve felt too. Where are my bushes?
The line in an old period drama comes back to me, “I have been brought very low, Molly.” Only I don’t wear filmy white dresses and walk, a glimmering shadow, amongst the evening primroses, sadly contemplating my disappointments. Or you know, how they always stand in windows and cry. Who gets to do that? We don’t have large windows that picturesquely look out onto manicured gardens. The closest I get is poring over the coffee table book someone gave me of a lovely farmette in Ojai, California.
At an arts conference earlier this year the theme was re-enchantment. It came at an apropos time, on the heels of 2020 and Covid and the wreckage of that year. People were disheartened and weary. They were done. They had wrestled through 12 months of shutdowns, job changes, zoom meetings, not traveling, not seeing as much of their family, and not being able to create as they had before. Most of the people there had a career in art, music, or dance and these things suffer in hard times. The host of the conference, a brilliant man named Stephen Roach, chose this as the theme to bring a little hope to the weary world. At the time it was a lovely weekend, but I didn’t need it like I do now. Now I am grasping at the straws of my memory, trying to remember the glimmers of each word, each concept, each dance.
Image from The Breathe and The Clay, 2021
One of the dances had an aerial artist and I remember watching her wrap up in the silks, slowly changing positions, hanging far above the rest of us in silver light. On the ground below was a large canvas where dancers, and one dancer in particular, sit and kneel and dance with their charcoals and paint, creating art with their hands and bodies. At the time the significance didn’t occur to me, but now I see that sometimes we don’t create art at a discreet distance. Sometimes we get covered in the colors, the oils, and the pigments as we sweep heavenward in worship with our hands, and bow down in cares onto the canvas of our life. We no longer use a brush as a tool. We are the tool.
That’s how I feel about life. I am not at a discreet distance. I am. Each touch is direct, each experience intimate. Intimacy with sorrow. What an exquisite pain. Slowly the canvas below me becomes a piece of art. Wrestling. I am wrestling with life. I am wrestling with God, who gives me life.
Job is someone we are all more or less familiar with — even if we are not religious most people know about a man in ancient times whose trouble was so great that we remember his name to this day. Imagine if Bill Gates were righteous and calamity like that came upon him! People would sit up and take note in a way that they wouldn’t for a reprobate sinner. I can imagine that Job had many, many friends but we think of him as having three. I don’t know this, but I imagine that these friends were actually learned, wise and powerful men. No one else would dare counsel someone in such extreme straits.
After 40 chapters of their wit and banter and counsel and wrestling God finally breaks his silence with Job. What follows is the most incredible perspective-setting I have ever read. God asks questions like “Who is the Father of the rain, or the dew? How can hook a sea monster like Leviathan? Which womb brings forth ice? Who can sneeze lightning?”
Probably most of us think of it as Job getting set in his place, but I have begun to see a different meaning. He isn’t set into his place, so much as he is given a place of belonging.
To understand this we have to appreciate the dire struggle Job was in. He was in a fight for his life. Think of it. He has lost everything but a cynical wife (and I mean, I might’ve been cynical too) and some wise-ass friends. He even lost his health. In all this he does not curse God. Now why should he curse God? I really don’t think it was the loss of all those material things objectively. It was what the loss meant to him personally. You might be thinking, duh, and I don’t blame you, but here’s what I have started to see after my own losses became more severe. I understand that breakups happen. I can even see why mine had to happen. I understand that accidents happen. I know why it happened.
It’s relatively easy to deal with those losses next to the loss of my self-confidence. When I say I have been brought low it is because I feel like a broken human. A shell of who I was. My sense of wonder and romance is gone. My innocent enjoyment of mundane joys. My ability to bring a sense of perspective. My delight in how loved I am. It is difficult for me not to curl up in a fetal position with regards to myself, all relationships, and God. It is hard not to take all these losses personally. Deep down at the core of all of us is this idea that we were made to be loved. When we suffer loss and destruction, we suffer it at the level of our innermost hearts. It is hard not to believe that this trouble has come upon us because there is something deeply wrong with us. One of the core struggles of Job expresses this, because he refuses to give up his righteousness even as his friends have a battering ram at the door.
Basically Job takes a position that says God does not punish us according to our sins. He was undoubtedly a sinful man. We all are. Job knows this, his wife knows it, his friends know it, and God knows it. And yet, God proclaims his righteousness, and Job does not waver from his knowledge of who he is. He is miserable beyond belief and he does not waver.
Until I die, I will not give up my integrity.
I have kept hold of my righteousness and will not let it go.
My heart does not rebuke any of my days.Job 27:6
Job took one for the team. One of the reasons I believe his story made it into the Bible is because almost no one else in all of scripture illustrates what it looks like to believe in God’s love and our subsequent righteousness because of that love, in the face of great suffering. Job could’ve cursed God and basically said, “You people are right about me. I am a horrible, horrible human being. I should not be loved. I was made to die in misery” but this would’ve been a direct slap in God’s face. God did not make Job, or us, horrible. He made us to be loved and made a way for us, through death, to be resurrected instead of being condemned. The struggle in Job is not the case for the sinfulness of man, it is a case for the love of God. It is the pure, sweet Gospel.
I am not ashamed to share this struggle with Job, in my own smaller way. I will not curse God. I will not say that all love and happiness should be denied to me because I have made a few mistakes. God loves me and does not condemn me.
Yes, the struggle is deep and wide. It’s been a long night. I am covered in paint and made of dust. I want to be the dancer in the clouds, shining with silken light but this is not me right now. I am on the ground — a brush in the hands of God. I know who made me. He made me to be loved. I will stand on this canvas, because I belong here.
L. Raine
Image sourced from “The Breathe and the Clay” Instagram page.
