He Walked Away Limping and Blessed

The stones at the crossing are the same stones that have always been there and the same two are loose and everybody knows which two.

Sunrise. Mist coming off the water in sheets. Three of them going over with their boots tied round their necks because it is quicker than getting them wet, and one of them is definitely going to go in.

He has his hand out for the man behind him. That is him, that has always been him: steady on a crossing, first one across, hand back for whoever is next.

And here is the thing about him that nobody could put into words, though several people have felt it.

He is two inches back from everything.

Not cold. Not distant, exactly. He is warm, he is present, he does the right things and he means them. But every conversation he has ever had since a particular stretch of his life happens with a small gap in it, a couple of inches of air between what is being said and the man saying it.

He knows exactly when it started and he is not going to say. And he has assumed, for years now, that coming all the way back means pretending that stretch never happened, and going back to being the man he was before it, and he does not believe that man exists any more.

Stand on the loose stone with me a second. Because there is a man in Genesis who wrestled all night and the last line about him is one of the most important sentences in the book for people like us.

He came out of it marked, and the text says blessed in the same breath

Jacob has spent the night alone at a river crossing wrestling somebody. It is the strangest passage in Genesis and I am not going to explain all of it.

Here is what happens at the end.

And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.Genesis 32:31

Two clauses. The sun rose upon him, and he was limping. Those are in the same sentence and neither cancels the other.

And read what came just before it, in verse 29: and he blessed him there.

So the man crosses that river blessed and limping. Both. He got the blessing he had spent the whole night refusing to let go without, and he got a hip that never worked properly again, and the text puts them next to each other without any suggestion that the second one spoils the first.

You are able to be marked and blessed at the same time, and the man in that chapter left the river carrying both. That is not a comfortable reading of a hard passage; Genesis 32:31 puts the sunrise and the limp in one sentence and Genesis 32:29 puts the blessing right before it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a night at Peniel and stands it up at a river crossing at sunrise with boots round three necks. Nothing about the mark on you disqualifies what you were given.

Now the assumption you have been living with, because it is doing you real damage.

You assumed that coming all the way back means going back to who you were before. That the goal is restoration to a previous edition, and since that man is gone, you are stuck at two inches.

But nobody in Scripture is restored to who they were. Jacob is not returned to the Jacob who left; he crosses that river with a new name and a permanent limp and both are given by God in the same night. Peter is not restored to the man who had never denied anybody; he is restored to something new, on a beach, with a job.

You are not being returned to a former version of yourself, and God has never once worked in that direction with anybody. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes new mean new rather than restored, which takes the man you used to be off the table entirely as a target.

The limp is not the same as the distance

One more thing, and then we will cross.

There is a difference between a mark and a distance, and I think you have been treating them as the same thing.

The limp Jacob got was permanent and it was public. Everybody who saw him walk knew something had happened to him. He did not hide it and there is no indication he was ashamed of it.

The two inches you keep is not a limp. It is a wall built to make sure nobody notices the limp.

And you can put the wall down without the limp going anywhere. That is the thing worth knowing. Being closer to people does not require you to be unmarked. It requires you to be marked in front of them, which is a different and smaller and more possible thing.

You are permitted to come closer while still carrying the mark, and the two have never had to travel together. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says my strength is made perfect in weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a visible weakness a place strength shows up in rather than a thing that has to be covered first.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works from two inches or from none.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how close you can currently get to anybody. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.