Evidence of God's Care

As of Friday at noon when I finished my last final exam for the semester, I am now officially halfway done with law school! And to tell the truth, it's gone by pretty fast, so I feel like it really won't be that long until I am a full-fledged attorney.

My last final, for my evidence class, was on Friday, and it was 50 multiple choice questions on the Federal Rules of Evidence. I already knew it was going to be a really difficult test, and because it was my last final coming at the end of three very busy weeks, I was really exhausted and overwhelmed trying to prepare for it last week. I also had a paper due Friday for another class that I was trying to finish, so I was trying to study as much as I could for this exam but it was pretty hard to do. I was just praying a lot that God would give me wisdom and insight on how best to prepare for the exam and to use my study time.

My professor had told our class a couple times during the semester that it would be a good idea to do the multiple-choice review questions in the back of the book. By the beginning of last week, I still hadn't done those questions, even though I had reviewed all the reading and made a study outline. Well, starting on Tuesday or Wednesday, I started feeling like I HAD to do those questions and that even if I didn't have time to do anything else to study, I needed to do those questions first. I had a strong impression that they were more important than studying my outline or reviewing the reading assignments.

I had to spend most of Wednesday and Thursday writing my paper for my other class, but Thursday night, when the feeling that I had to do those questions in the book hadn't gone away, I sat down to tackle them. The answers were in the book, and so I was able to check them as I went along. There were 200 in all, but I only managed to do 150 before I just fell asleep--it was 2am and the exam was in 7 hours and I just couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.

So on Friday morning, I got to the exam and start reading through it. It didn't take me long to realize that, with the exception of a couple names being changed, about half the exam questions were taken verbatim from ones in the book I had looked at mere hours before! Because of that, I was able to speed through questions that I otherwise would have really struggled with. I've never been so glad to have followed a professor's advice!

After I got home that day, I was flipping through the last 50 questions in the book--the ones that I didn't get to because I couldn't stay awake anymore. Maybe one or two of the questions I didn't get to had been on the exam, but literally all of the rest of them were from the section I managed to finish. To make a long story short, I was totally overwhelmed by God's concern for my life and the way He even cares about helping a tired law student with her evidence final! He definitely answered my prayers for wisdom on how to study!

I pray that YOU have felt His hand of grace in your life lately as well.

Wrestling for Blessing

Recently, I was reading the story of when Jacob, one of the most interesting characters in the entire Old Testament, wrestled with God. You can read it in Genesis 32. It's one of the strangest passages in the Bible: basically, Jacob was getting ready to reunite with his brother Esau, and he was very worried about how the meeting would go because he had stolen Esau's blessing years before. The night before, he was standing alone at the ford of the Jabbok River when a mysterious man (understood to be an appearance of God) stepped out of the shadows and "wrestled with him till daybreak." The two wrestled all night long, and Jacob finally said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

I will not let you go unless you bless me. This story has always kind of bothered me, and I finally figured out why: it's so unorthodox! Wrestling it out with God and demanding that He bless us? That is not what you typically hear of as a good way to approach God (which in our times is usually done through prayer). No, we're usually told to submit to God, to demonstrate our total willingness to follow His will, and never to insist on getting our own way.

Jacob took a much more stubborn, demanding, persistent, tenacious approach. He literally fought it out with God all night long, holding on to Him and demanding that God bless Him then and there. I was tempted to think this might have just been a dream or a vision of Jacob's, but yet, there was a physical manifestation of his night of wrestling with God: in the intensity of his struggle, he injured his hip and walked away limping the next day.

But there's more to the story. Jacob received the blessing that he asked for from God. Jacob demanded God's blessing in a very physical way, holding on to the mysterious man and refusing to release his grip until He blessed him. And verse 29 tells us, "Then he blessed him there."

The most surprising thing is that Jacob's utterly unorthodox approach worked. He insisted on receiving God's blessing, and receive it He did. God's blessing and favor in Jacob's life was clearly evident when he went to meet Esau the next day and was warmly received, even though he had been fearing for his life because he was convinced that Esau hated him.

Jacob's life wasn't always the best example for us to follow--after all, he cheated Esau out of his father's blessing and was deceptive in other areas of his life. But in this passage Jacob had a moment of raw openness and persistence with God that in some ways could be a model for all of us. It is ok to ask, and ask boldly, for the blessings of God. It's ok to be stubborn in prayer and stubborn in pleading that the favor and blessing of God cover our lives. If God's response to Jacob here is any indication, it's even ok to hold onto Him for all we are worth and insist that He graciously bless us.

It won't be without cost. That kind of desperate passion with God, that raw vulnerability, strips us of our pretenses and our excuses and demands a new level of commitment, of reckless abandon. It demands that we struggle through it with God when everyone around us tells us to give up. It requires that we exert ourselves in prayer in a way that we possibly never have done before. It may be painful and difficult at times.

But although Jacob walked away limping, he also walked away blessed.