Wrestling Time??

Listening to Speaking of Faith the other day, the guest mentioned Jacob's wrestling with the angel (or God) and the result was that his thigh was crippled in some way or another. As I heard that I realized that my hip has been hurting more than usual recently. Does that mean I, too, have been wrestling with God? Again?

Probably. That may be why my postings the past month have not been mentioning my spiritual journey. For any of you longer-time readers of pmPilgrim, you will know that I often work out some of my thinking and directions by writing here. That is, after I have worked on them in my head, my meditation and prayer, and my journal.

Which isn't to say that it has been a non-productive or even non-spiritual season. In fact it has been anything but. Which means that God continues to work on me as usual. I continue to try to figure out what God is saying and why. A week ago I pulled my Watchword for the Year, a Moravian tradition for the new year. It is meant as a guide, a direction, a reminder of the presence of God in my life in the new year. I posted it there on the right sidebar as I do every year.

Those who look to God are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
Psalm 34:5 (NIV)

As I read it and thought about it I realized that this is talking about something more real than success, more hopeful than material things, more indicative of God's presence than voices from heaven or bolts of lightning from the sky. There is a radiance, a light, that seems to come from somewhere else yet deep within.

Many of us in the treatment field have seen a variation on this. When a person starts to get sober, when the whole immensity of the possibility of recovery begins to work on a person, their eyes change. They get life. Their eyes sparkle. And not just the eyes but the eyelids and eyebrows. That's one of the ways I know that recovery has a spiritual component. It shows up in people in ways they aren't even aware of.

So perhaps, I thought as I pondered the watchword, my spiritual goal for the new year is to stop wrestling and let God work. Perhaps the wrestling will only result in an injured thigh or hip. But in not wrestling there is a sense of calm. It is what can be called acceptance of the will of God and having the power to carry it out in my life.

The result will be a life that does not have to live covered in shame. Perhaps it is shame that dulls the eyes before recovery, a deep down awareness that something has taken life away and replaced it with the things that lead away from God. As one begins to get the way of God in their life, that covering begins to lift. The gray sameness of a life lived without hope gets less and less to be replaced by the many colors of life in the human face.

Like the star with the Wise Men on the first Epiphany, the words of my Watchword will hopefully guide me closer to my Lord and my God in the coming year. Again God's love is revealed in the face of Jesus. I need never be covered again with shame.

Thanks be to God!