Last August, while the rector of our church was on vacation, members of the parish were invited to preach.  I was honored to be asked and gave the following sermon based on the story of Jacob’s wrestling match in Genesis 32.

Jacob was a taker. His name meant “grabber,” or “usurper” and Jacob lived up to it the minute he came out of the womb holding on to his older brother Esau’s heel. That kind of set the tone for what followed.

Early on, Jacob tricked Esau into selling him his birthright and much later pretended to be Esau to get Isaac’s special, and apparently irrevocable, paternal blessing – an act which didn’t go over well with Esau, who vowed to kill him in revenge. Wishing to avoid being killed, Jacob then ships off to his mother’s brother’s place, where he falls in love with Rachel. Her father Laban insists on seven years of work from Jacob before they can marry, and when they do, he sneakily substitutes Leah for her younger sister on the wedding night and the marriage is consummated. Jacob protests the next morning and is allowed to marry Rachel a week later, for another seven years of labor.

And children? Well that’s really complicated. Between Jacob, his wives Leah and Rachel, their maids Bilhah and Zilpah, and some mandrake root, there are eleven sons. At any rate, tiring of his indentured servitude, Jacob packs up his wives, maids, kids and livestock and sneaks away in dead of night for home, where he faces certain death at the hands of his murderous brother Esau. Remember Esau?

As we heard today, on the night before their meeting, Jacob sends a series of gifts to Esau, hustles his wives, maids, kids and livestock across the river Jabbok and settles in for an uncomfortable night alone. Seemingly out of nowhere, a man appears and starts wrestling with Jacob. All night, they go at it. If you’ve ever seen a wrestling match, you can imagine the grappling, struggling, heaving, huffing and puffing in the dust. Minutes turn to hours as they continue their conflict. As dawn is breaking, finally the man strikes Jacob’s hip, dislocating the joint. Jacob hangs onto the man, not fighting anymore, but holding on tightly. The man says, “let me go.” Jacob replies, “I will not let you go, until you bless me.” One is of course reminded of Jacob’s deceit much earlier when he sought Isaac’s blessing. Remember Isaac?

So instead of blessing him, the man asks his name. When he replies “Jacob” the man says he will no longer be Jacob, “but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” He asks the man’s name, and instead receives a blessing and then presumably the man goes away and Jacob limps off, permanently injured from the pre-dawn struggle, and into his new life.

So what’s going on here? After a long, complicated – really complicated – life filled with struggle, deceit, and trickery, Jacob waits, wracked with fear and plagued with doubt at meeting his brother whom he cheated so many years before. This translation describes Jacob’s opponent simply as a man, but other translations and interpretations identify him as an angel or God. Whether you think of his opponent as human, divine – or even his own conscience – it’s clear that Jacob is being taken to task; he’s literally being forced to confront who he is – and as it turns out, who he will be.

Facing what he thinks is his death the next day, Jacob has to be taking stock and thinking about what brought him to this place. He’s got to be feeling some remorse, some regret at what he did to Esau, or how he treated Laban when he snuck away. At the same time, he must also have been thinking about how he had been tricked into marrying Leah, and spending an extra seven years working for Laban. Up to that point, Jacob had lived a full life – replete with blessings (both legitimate and ill-gotten) and curses. He is at what we would probably call a tipping point. So his struggle that night was both physical and metaphysical. His very real wrestling match with the man, and his spiritual struggle with himself. You might even say he was wrestling with his demons.

Don’t we all?

I can relate to Jacob’s struggle. As most of you know, my wife Mary Elizabeth suffered a massive stroke about five years ago. We were in London at the time and remained there for four months, while she was in a hospital, on the long road back to us. It was a terrible, dark time, filled with uncertainty, fear and sometimes hopelessness.

But for me, those first four months were easy, compared to the next four years. They’ve been filled with physical, logistical and emotional challenges, which Mary Elizabeth met full-on with determination and good humor. But for me, it was a different story.

It’s been a real struggle, with ups and downs and everything in between. As those of you who have read my blog know, it’s been very hard for me to accept where we are now, and to be honest, I’ve grappled with disappointment, disillusionment and depression when I looked at our post-stroke life, making the inevitable comparisons to pre-stroke life and asking all those “what if” questions.

It’s one of those hard truths, because with it came the acknowledgement that when I looked at our life, I saw what could have been, instead of what was. With that of course came the bitter aftertaste of guilt that I wasn’t more grateful for what we had, focusing instead on what we didn’t have.

And quite frankly, I’ve also been dissatisfied with myself. I wish I could have been more positive in the last four years, spending less time in the shadows and more time in the light of grace.

At times I’ve even resented the cheerfulness people showed towards us, thinking that if they only knew how hard things were, they wouldn’t be so darned cheerful. I stubbornly held on to the notion that our lives had been ruined, thinking about all those things that we’d never do again, bemoaning all those dreams we’d never realize.

I wrestled with these feelings for a long time. What was a night for Jacob has been years for me. But lately, my perspective has been changing – at last the dawn has broken – as it always does – and I’m finally catching on to what all you cheerful folks have known all along.

We’ve been blessed.

And not just because we feel lucky that it could have been much worse. I always struggled with the notion that a lack of negatives should be enthusiastically embraced as positive. That is until I started hearing from strangers who had read the blog. Other people whose spouses had suffered the exact same type of brain stem stroke as Mary Elizabeth and hadn’t lived more than a few days afterward. So I stopped taking for granted that she had survived, and started looking for ways to help her thrive.

I’ve also come to understand first-hand the blessing of compassion – accepting with gratitude the kindness, support and concern of friends and family – things we might never have realized had the stroke not changed everything. Thank you all for that.

And so, I’m finally more focused on who we are, what we’ve gained and where we’re going, rather than who we used to be, where we’ve been, and what we’ve lost.

But sometimes I’ll get caught off guard – like when I see an old photograph, hear Mary Elizabeth’s voice in a video, or even see her old handwriting. It will catch me unawares and I’ll feel a piercing pain, short-lived but intense – a reminder that we often have to go through hell to get to heaven.

So like Jacob, I guess I have a bit of a limp as I walk away from that dark night, and into the brightness of the coming day.