Jacob wrestled at the river all night and would not let go until he received a blessing. He walked away limping but renamed. This sonnet sits with that long, costly contention, and with the strange truth that the wound and the blessing sometimes arrive together.
The Sonnet
I will not let You go until You bless, I said into the wrestling of the night, And held the holy stranger to His press, Refusing to release the contested fight. The hours bent the river with their weight, My strength gave out, then somehow held again, The dark held no surrender, no abate, Until the eastern sky began to wane. The hip was wrenched, the blessing was bestowed, A new name spoken into trembling ground, And though I limped the river's other road, I carried more than I had ever found. So bless the wrestling, when it must be done, The wound and gift are sometimes given as one.
Reflection
There are nights of the soul that ask everything we have. The crisis of faith, the loss that will not be reasoned away, the question that will not be answered. We wrestle, and the wrestling does not feel holy while it is happening. It feels like ruin. It feels like being unmade.
But the story of Jacob suggests something the modern mind has forgotten, that the deepest blessings of God sometimes come through the hardest contests. We are not always blessed in our ease. Sometimes we are blessed in the very place where we were broken. The limp Jacob carried for the rest of his life was not a mark of failure. It was the evidence that he had touched the holy and lived.
If you are wrestling tonight, hold on. The dawn is coming. The blessing is real. The hip may be wrenched, but you will not walk away the same, and that may be the gift.
