Ball and Socket

Meditation on Jacob's limp.

Back to my friends in Genesis today. Genesis 32: 31,32:

“The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel,

limping because of his hip. Therefore, to this day

the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh

that is on the hip socket because he touched the socket

of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh.”

This editorial comment by the Genesis writer! How easily a true limping conversion becomes religious tradition. The sun rose upon limping Jacob, who lurched with his new blessing, trusting God with every step that his dislocated hip would hold up and he wouldn’t fall. “Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.” The story invites anyone to learn from the limping man, but the storyteller steps back from the telling and explains the tradition of dietary restriction, even though this tradition did not make it into the law.

Doesn’t God want us to become limpers rather than keepers of tradition? Shouldn’t we return to the reason for the tradition rather than just follow form? I remember the story of the mother who was cooking a roast. She began by cutting off the butt end of the roast, and one of her children asked, “Why do you do that?” She said, “I don’t know, but that’s how my mother did it and I learned from her.” So, she called her mother and asked her. “Oh, my goodness!” her mother replied, “The reason I cut off the end of the roast is because it didn’t fit in my roasting pan!”

The lesson is not to turn a real encounter of God into a law or tradition, but to go yourself, alone, and wrestle with God with whatever is your issue, and hope He gives you a limp. When you have received the blessing, and your new name, you will feel the warm touch of the sun on your back as you walk haltingly passed Penuel, which means “the face of God.”

I have to cross the Jabbok river too. I genuinely hope I am limping, leaning and not going in my own strength. I have asked Jesus to take my hand, sometimes with every breath, as I cannot live without clinging to Him. Even now, at this moment, the yellow air of fear tries to choke me. But I am a flame! I will consume the fear, burn it away and overcome!

I remember the Narrows of Zion in Utah, where the river is the path. Rather than cross the river, you actually walk upstream with wet rocks beneath you. Jim and Shannon and I did this, and I am still amazed that no one turned an ankle. If God can do that, He can take us on this next adventure.

It’s nice to remember Jacob’s hip when you bone a chicken or a lamb, but isn’t it better to learn to limp as he did? “I live, yet not I but Christ in me.” I have been given a new name, “Christian” – “little Christ,” and a limp. I am a limping Christian. Should I ask for relief from this suffering? No. Jesus is my ball and socket, the staff I’ll lean on forever. As David wrote of Christ in Psalm 22:

“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;

My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast.

”