God Meets Us In The Night
Table Talk
Setting the Table
You are welcome here. Come just as you are, bringing whatever is on your heart today. Take a few moments and allow yourself to just be. Take a couple deep breaths, grab yourself a cup of coffee, light a candle, do something that brings you comfort. Allow yourself to be present in this moment.
Take a moment to notice what has been taking up space in your mind lately—what are you carrying? What tends to surface for you when everything else gets quiet.
“Learn from the nightshades.
They grow in the darkest places.”
- “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet”, by Sara Bareilles
Genesis 32: 24-28
Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’
Food for Thought
It is again the time of year when the darkness arrives a little earlier each evening. The days are growing shorter, the sun slipping away a little sooner, and suddenly we are turning on lamps and settling into the night before we quite feel ready for it.
There is something about the night that makes us a little more honest.
During the day, there is always something else to do. A text to answer. A meeting to get to. A load of laundry to fold. Someone who needs us. Noise and busyness can be good things, but they can also keep us moving just fast enough that we don’t have to notice everything happening inside of us.
But then the night comes.
The house gets quiet. Our hands become still. The distractions begin to disappear, and suddenly there we are—with our thoughts, our questions, our fears, our hopes.
I have always had a bit of a kinship with the night. As a kid, I would stay up late on fishing trips with my dad, watching the fishing rods while keeping a watch for shooting stars. Even now, nighttime is often when my creative mind comes alive. There is something freeing about those quiet hours when everyone else has gone to bed and the world seems to loosen its grip for a little while.
But the night has also been where some of my deepest fears have surfaced.
As a young child, I spent many late nights curled up in my mom’s lap, sobbing as I asked questions about death and life and eternity. The nighttime has a way of lifting the veil on things we can sometimes avoid during the day. It reminds us that we are finite. We are fragile. We are vulnerable. We are human.
Perhaps this is part of why the story of Jacob wrestling with God through the night has stayed with me. Jacob arrives at the Jabbok carrying a complicated past and an uncertain future. And there, in the darkness of night, he wrestles with God until morning.
I imagine this story could connect with all of us, because we all know something about that kind of night. The night after a diagnosis. The night when a relationship ends. The night when you lose a job or realize the future you imagined may not be the future you get. The night when you lie awake worrying about your child. The night when old regrets come knocking. The night when you find yourself wrestling with God, with yourself, with your questions, with a world that doesn’t make much sense.
We often want the wrestling to end quickly. We want answers. We want clarity. We want to know that everything will be okay. But that is not usually how these kinds of nights work. These nights can be long and difficult, painful and lonely. Yet sometimes the morning reveals unexpected moments of grace, too—the night can yield an awakening to beginnings.
Like seeds that germinate in the dark. And roots that grow beneath the surface. New life sometimes begins before there is anything visible to us. Even the stars we see at night are reminders that there is more happening in the night than our eyes can perceive.
Maybe our own nights hold this kind of mystery, too. Not because suffering is somehow good for us. Not because every painful experience has a lesson neatly waiting inside it. But because even in the places where we feel most uncertain, something in us may still be taking shape.
Jacob walks away from his night wounded. He also walks away blessed.
To be human means that we do not make it through this life without wounds. Love wounds us. Grief wounds us. Mistakes wound us. Change wounds us. Sometimes even becoming more fully ourselves requires leaving behind something we once thought we needed.
And yet, somehow, we can be wounded and blessed at the same time. Our nights can bring us face-to-face with our limitations and our potential, our humanity and our belovedness.
Maybe that is what we need to remember when the night feels long:
We do not have to have everything figured out before we are loved.
We do not have to emerge from the wrestling unchanged.
We do not have to know what morning will bring.
God meets us there—in the questions, in the uncertainty, in the places where we are tired and limping and not quite sure what comes next.
And perhaps, when morning finally comes, we may discover that the God we were wrestling with was also the God who was holding us all along.
Draw a bus, car, boat, or other form of transportation. Write or draw a fear or worry you are carrying inside, then place something you want to guide you—hope, love, God, courage, or community—in the driver’s seat. Your fears may come along for the ride, but they don’t get to drive.
Write the words, “Beginning … this moment … All that is to come.” Above each phrase write the word, “LOVE”. Remember that God’s love was in the beginning, is with you in this moment, and will be with you in all that is to come beyond this moment. Wherever we find ourselves, we will be held in and by the love of God.
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Blessing
God of the night,
Meet us in the places where we are restless, in the questions we cannot answer, and in the fears we cannot quiet. Hold us through our wrestling. Stay with us until morning. And when we rise, remind us that we are still—and always—beloved.
Amen.
A little Table Talk for your table...
Have you ever had one of those long nights where you felt like you were wrestling with a problem or wrestling with God?
What do you remember about the next morning? How did you feel? The same, more conflicted, or reassured?
Is there something specific with which you are wrestling right now? Share it with a trusted friend, or take a few minutes by yourself to journal about it.
Try taking it to the Kids Table...
How do you feel about the night? Does it make you feel calm, is it kind of scary, would you rather stay up and play instead of go to bed?
Name one thing that you can see better in the dark than you can when it’s light.
Is there a fear that you’re struggling with right now? Share it with a trusted adult or write about it with yourself. Remember that through the struggles and fears of life, God’s love is with us.
Meet our Welcoming Voice!
Lin Story-Bunce is a North Carolina native and lovingly calls Greensboro, NC home. She earned a Masters of Divinity from Wake Forest University and has served a wonderful and thoughtful congregation at College Park Baptist Church since 2009, pastoring to families and their faith development. Most of all, Lin loves the moments she gets to connect with her family, snowboarding with her wife and keeping up with their four kiddos and two energetic pups. Lin is a teacher, preacher, dreamer, and procrastinator who, if you ask her youth group, has a knack for trying to do way too many things in far too little time.
To hear more from Lin throughout the week, follow along on our Instagram!
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