DEVOTION: Wrestling with God

By Leila Halawe | @LHalawe

When I became a Christian, the hardest thing for me was surrender – surrendering my life, my heart, my dreams, everything. God has a sense of humour because He has made me fiercely independent and put a control streak in me, yet He regularly asks me to hand over control to Him, and that has been hard for me. Very hard. So when God started asking me to completely depend on Him, it was foreign ground and I found myself wrestling with God instead of being still before Him. I found myself handing things over, only to try and wrestle them back from God. I hand it over, then try to wrestle it back. Hand it over, wrestle it back. I have spent many a night wrestling with God over things and to be honest, I felt bad about it for a while and felt like I wasn’t being a proper Christian, but then I stumbled across Jacob in the Old Testament and found myself feeling a little better.

In Genesis 32:22-31 we read about Jacob wrestling with God:

“That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “what is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with god and with humans and have overcome.” Jacob said, “please tell me your name.” But he replied, “why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “it is because I saw god face to face, and yet my life was spared.”. The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.”

When I read about Jacob, I found myself identifying with his situation. As I said, I’ve wrestled with God often and at times have kept wrestling when I should have thrown in the towel long ago (that would be that stubbornness that I mentioned earlier.) But there were a couple of things that really stood out for me when reading Jacob’s encounter. Firstly, Jacob was stubborn. As in, really stubborn. As in, even an out of joint hip didn’t stop him from wrestling with God. I have been, on many on occasion, called a stubborn mule, and with good reason; I can be exceptionally stubborn and when I dig my heels in on something, it takes a lot to shift me. Which can be good and bad. Good in some instances, bad in others, especially when it comes to being stubborn with God because as much as I like to think I know better, to date, God’s ways and plans have always better than mine. But it’s God’s response to Jacob’s stubbornness that really intrigues me.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. (Gen 32:25)

While this may look like Jacob was too powerful for God so God had to poke his hip to stop him, it is the complete opposite. God poked Jacob’s hip to protect Him; He knew that Jacob would keep going and going and it would eventually end badly for him, so to protect him, God pokes his hip to slow him down and prevent him getting hurt even more. He needed to slow him down. He needed to get him to a place where he could see him face to face. Where Jacob could focus on God’s face and hear God’s voice because the thing is, it’s only when we stop and look at God face to face, when we slow down and come face to face with Jesus, that our lives are changed.

God wants us to sit face to face with our Saviour.

God will slow us down, and occasionally stop us completely, to protect us from ourselves. He wants us to be with Him face to face, without distraction, so that we can properly hear His voice. So that we can walk in the ways He wants us to, not the ways we want to, because we can be stubborn and cause ourselves harm without realising it. And it’s only after we are face to face with Jesus that we are changed.

‘the sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.’ (Gen 32:31) 

Jacob called the place he wrestled with God Peniel and Peniel means face of God. Amid his wrestling, when God slowed him down, Jacob saw the face of God. Jacob walked away with a limp that stayed with him because he had been touched by God. And when God touches our lives, we are forever changed. We are never the same. It is in those moments of intimacy with God, when we are before Him, when our heart is stilled on Him and our eyes are fixed on Him, when we are looking Him face on, that He will touch us and change us forever.

What are we wrestling with God about today? What do we still need to surrender? Maybe today, we will allow God to slow us down, to stop us so that we can look Him in the eye. Maybe today, as we surrender over whatever it is we’re wrestling, God will touch ‘our hip’ and change us. Maybe today, we will see His face and be ever changed into the likeness of Jesus. Whatever it is you may be wrestling God for, I pray that you will see His face and be forever changed.

This post is cross posted at ACW and Looking In

Leila (Lays) Halawe is a Sydney based coffee loving nonfiction writer and blogger. She has published a short devotional, Love By Devotion, and shares her views on life and faith via her blog page Looking In . You can connect with her via Facebook at Leila Halawe Author  and via Twitter at Leila Halawe.

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Getting unstuck

The title of this blog post is actually not quite the truth. As I write this, I still feel stuck. 

Very stuck.

In the past six months, I've started five new books, but finished nothing. In the past three weeks, I haven't managed to write even one new chapter of my current story. 

If I was a car, I'd be up to my axles in mud. Spinning my wheels. Digging myself deeper into the hole. Getting nowhere, and the harder I try, the more stuck I get.

Photo by the Henry Ford via Flickr

It's messy, frustrating, and no fun at all. 

Writing and releasing my first three published books in less than six months required that I put in a load of hours, but they were easy. I just did the work. Wrote the stories, sent them off to my editor and critique partner, did my edits and revisions, published the books. I'd been writing on and off all my life. This was just a lot more on, and very little off. I knew God wanted me to publish the books, and so I did it, with a single-minded focus.

Then, with book four, things went wrong. Real life got in the way of writing. My husband was ill, and needed my attention. A beloved pet died despite weeks of careful nursing and so much fervent prayer. I missed deadlines. Writing became a struggle. The book did release, eventually, but six weeks late. I lost all my preorders. Sales of all my books, which had done way better than expected, crashed. 

Angry with God, I forgot all about the deep spiritual lessons He'd made me teach my characters writing books two and three. Lessons about what truly loving others means. Lessons about putting Him first. Lessons about His purposes being far higher than our own plans. Lessons about what it means to truly trust in Him, and surrender to Him. 

God didn't forget. He had other ways to teach me those lessons.

From book 2: Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:18 
God is teaching me that I wasn't truly living His love. He doesn't want me making writing the most important thing I do, giving it the biggest share of my time. He wants me to truly love the people He's placed in my life. To not just say I love them, but to show it, by giving them time, by listening, by putting their needs ahead of my writing and my to-do list and my own plans. 

From Book 2: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:29

I thought I trusted God, thought I wanted to do His will. The problem was, I still wanted to do it all myself. I wasn't leaning on Him or surrendering anything to Him.  I trusted in my own strength and my own plans. I had to be broken to let go of that, to truly allow Him to take my burdens and learn what it means to rest in Him. 

From Book 3: I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me. Psalm 57:2 ESV

God had to show me that He has other purposes for me besides writing. I write to share His love, but I need to live it, first. He is fulfilling His purpose for my life, in His way, and it's better than mine. 

From Book 4: And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart. Ezekiel 11:19 NLT

I never quite understood why God gave me this verse for this book. It fit my heroine, who had a hard heart, not trusting God or love at the start of the book, but the context of the verse is about choosing to worship God rather than worshipping idols. I'm only just coming to realise I'd made an idol of writing, of my business plan, of Amazon rankings and sales figures. 

God had an answer for that. Take away the sales, and my release schedules, and my earnings forecasts. Take away all my plans. That hurt. I felt such a failure. I cried, a lot. 

But now, I'm grateful. If the big plans I made last year for my writing career had worked, I never would have learned to trust God. I never would have handed my burdens over to Him. I never would have known His rest. I'd be truly stuck, trying to write a book every six or seven weeks, without a break. Eep! Instead, he taught me to look to Him and rely on Him.

It's funny. Last week, when I first asked God for guidance on what to blog about, just the title came to me. I figured I was supposed to write about overcoming writer's block, and researched a load of links on timed writing and the psychology of creative blocks. Instead, God wanted me to write a post about looking at being stuck in a different way. 

The owners of these boats could struggle to push their boats back into the water. It would be hard, but if they worked enough, they'd do it. Or they can simply wait for the tide to come back in and float the boats for them. 

Sometimes the answer to a block isn't to try harder, to push more, to beat ourselves up for not doing the work, or for giving in to resistance. Sometimes, maybe far more often than we realise, the answer is to look to God and wait on His timing.

Knowing that, suddenly I don't feel stuck at all!

But I stand silently before the Lord, waiting for him to rescue me. 

For salvation comes from him alone. 

Psalm 62:5