Do Not Run

When God is teaching you a lesson—sometimes he has to prove his point literally. His lesson to me in all of my fighting these past years has been “Do Not Run.” I am quite stubborn, ask anyone who knows me well, I usually end up pushing myself until I crash, try to take control of the chaos, and create a plan or a list of how to accomplish things. I get so used to the “me against the world” mentality that I carry way too much on my shoulders and often times rely more on me then on God. I get confused often with the concept of giving things to God because mentally it often feels that I have failed or that I am weak so I push and I push. I tell God, Hey, thanks for the offer, but I got this. All I have are tired shoulders, and a worn path from all my spinning in circles. I think God must look down and laugh at us.

It took God touching Jacob’s hip socket to get Jacob to give up the fight and to face the awesome reality that God is all powerful, all knowing, and ever present. When we fail to allow God to be God in our lives, how can he get our attention? How can he make us realize that He alone carries the world on his shoulders, that He alone keeps it in rotation, and that He alone controls all powers of this world? We are not the gods of our universe, though we often try to prove to God that we are.

It took God allowing a health issue to stop me in my tracks (literally), I had to stop running, I had to physically slow down, relax (a foreign concept), and find out what my world meant when I wasn’t the one running in circles trying to keep it spinning.

It seems so simple; God proving himself to us in the everyday areas of our lives. What is going on in your life right now that you are fighting? That you are battling? That seems like a thorn in your side? It could be God trying to get your attention. We are not as big as we seem to think we are but we are also not so small that God will not teach us lessons through our everyday lives.

When you start looking at hardships as lessons you will walk away as Jacob did and say…”It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” There are blessings in hardships because Gods intent is for us to be like Jacob and to “overcome.”
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Genesis 32:22-31.

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.