Wrestling with God

I was reminded of Jacob's nighttime wrestling with God this week (Genesis 32.21-32). On Monday, I felt like I had one of the clearest experiences of God leading me that I've ever felt. I spent the rest of the week puzzling over the details of exactly what that meant. Why was God telling me these particulars? What should I do with them? Jacob struggled with God for a blessing; I was struggling for an understanding of how these details fit together. Being in the mostly uninterrupted quiet of the Ozarks was just where I needed to be for this.

A lot of what I would like to know remains a mystery to me. I started to doubt if I had really heard the Holy Spirit. Could it be I was just reading too much into things? No. I prayed that God would show me a sign if I was really hearing Him and not just myself. Unexpectedly, this morning's sermon was on taking the leadings of the Spirit; the topic had been picked a few weeks ago (although I had not noticed that), but our pastor had scrapped the original sermon and written a different one yesterday that hit even closer. It really seemed like a confirmation to me. As usher captain for the month of May, I was alone in the Narthex during the sermon, which was just as well, for I was overcome by what I was hearing.

Other things have stood out in the last few days. Having finished a few novels (the Da Vinci Code, Silenced, the Remnant and Armageddon) in the last few weeks, I decided to return to a non-fiction piece I had barely started last year and had never made it back to: Philip Yancey's Rumors of Another World. Yancey always has something good to say, but today I was taken aback by what I found on the pages directly following where I had stopped so many months ago. It all fit into the pattern of what I thought God was telling me. A few sentences were eerily almost word-for-word what I had planned to jot down as I organized all of my thoughts while in the Ozarks this week.

I still don't know what to do with this information, but I know I need to keep listening.