Jacob Wrestling with God

by Jack Baumgartner

Wrestling with the Divine

I love this reading about Jacob and his struggle. i really find myself identifying with him in all his inadequacy and in all his wrestling. I found this wonderful selection of quotes about this week's Hebrew reading. hope you find them help[ful.
Shannon L. Alder, 21st century
"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle."

Mary Balogh, 21st century
"Was memory always as much of a burden as it could sometimes be a blessing?"

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 20th century 
"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, 20th century
"Calvin: 'There's no problem so awful, that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse."

Franz Kafka, 20th century 
"My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted."

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 20th century
"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."   

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 20th century
"There is scarcely any passion without struggle."

Theodore Roosevelt, 20th century
"Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering."

Ravi Zacharias, Recapture the Wonder, 20th century 
"The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle."

from http://www.ucc.org/worship_samuel_sermon_seeds_august_6_2017

Wrestling with God

Peniel 1

Sometimes demons,

sometimes God;

we wrestle in uncertainty.

Is it the God within with whom I wrestle:

or is it the God within who wrestles through me,

applying the headlock with my arms

to overpower that which would claim my life?

I strive and grapple,

confronted by desires and fears

that lay hold of me and threaten cold paralysis;

whilst the needs of gospel sting me

to engage and respond with the heat

of fruitful living. In this life and death struggle

is found the unexpected;

glimmers of surprising joy,

and grace that brings the disparate things

together.

So I daily enter the ring to wrestle

with one called Love,

wanting to be overcome

but fearing, too, the cost of that defeat.

Victory is also costly.