"Oh God of my father, Abraham, God of my father Isaac, oh Lord who said to me, 'Go back to your country and your relatives, and I will make you prosper,' I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness that you have shown your servant. I had only my staff when I crossed this Jordan, but now I have become two great companies. Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and the mothers and the children. But you have said, 'I will make you prosper, and make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.'"

So he's done everything he knows to do. He's made his preparations. Then we are told that Jacob, having sent his family on the other side of the river, finds himself alone. We're told that that night he got up and he sent his family across the river, and he was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

There are two things I notice as I look at Jacob wrestling with the man: that as the night, the long night, the hard night of struggle goes on, Jacob discovers that the person he is really wrestling with is God. As he wrestles, the man sees that he cannot overpower Jacob, and he touches the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip is wrenched. And the man says, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replies, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

What is it that Jacob wanted more than anything else in life? What is it that we, in the deepest longings of our being, want more than anything else in life?

Sometimes we don't even know how to put our longings into words. But the word for Jacob was the word "blessing". I want to know the smile of God. I want to know the favor of God. I want to know that what I am doing with my life is pleasing to the one who made me, that my life has purpose and significance that honors the God that has called me and made promises to me.

What Jacob wants more than anything is the blessing. But the way in which Jacob has sought to get the blessing all through his life is a way that has led to brokenness. He's been competitive. He's been one who has sought to win at all costs. He has tried to get the blessing by cheating and by guile and it has only turned to ashes, and with him fleeing for his life, and with a broken family, and now, with the fearful prospect of war with Esau.

And so he wrestles and he struggles with God, and I think at least two things in the struggle are significant:

First, it was night. How many times, in the dark places, has the night seemed so long as we waited for tomorrow, when we didn't know what tomorrow would have in it? In illness and uncertainty, about a job or about a member of our family or about something that we really cared about and were concerned about or were worried about, the night can seem endlessly, endlessly long. It's night, and Jacob is alone. The impression that you get is that maybe this was the first time he'd been alone and quiet in a busy life full of trying to achieve success. Finally, in the silence and in the aloneness, Jacob comes face to face with his fears and face to face with God. And he says to the one with whom he wrestles, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

And then comes a moment of truth. The man says to him, "What is your name?" Simple question. Easy to answer, isn't it, unless you know that Jacob has lied about his name in order to get ahead. Jacob has pretended to be something that he's not. Jacob has felt that who he was wasn't good enough, and so when his father, Isaac, had said, "What is your name? Who are you?" In order to get the blessing, Jacob had said, "I am Esau." He had pretended to be what he was not. This time, the man says, "Tell me your name; what is it?" And Jacob answers, "Jacob." The deceiver. That's me. That's who I am. When I face myself and when I face my God I know the truth about myself - the mixed up, confused, conniving and yet longing and thirsting for something more.

The man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel," and in this renaming, Jacob is acknowledged, and in the new name, Jacob is told that, even with his weakness, even with his failures, even with that sorry track record, God works with imperfect people. He works with Jacobs, and he makes them Israels. Israel in the Hebrew means, "The one who has striven with God."

Then Jacob says to the man, "Please, tell me your name." Why did he want to do that? Why did he ask that question? Because of some sense that if he knew the name of God perhaps he could control God. But the man replies, "Why do you ask my name? You know who you've been wrestling with. You've not really been wrestling with your brother; you've been wrestling with me, and my good purpose for your life." So Jacob called the place Peniel, and he said, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

There was one other thing that changed. The affirmation and the blessing of God was Jacob's, but Jacob had been wounded in the wrestling. So Jacob moves in to the next stage of his life as one who has wrestled and struggled with God and bears the mark of that struggle; as he takes the new promise and the new hope into the future; as he discovers that God has prepared the way for him and that Esau meets him with peace, and with forgiveness, and with the possibility of a new beginning.

A friend of mine was wounded recently. He had a heart attack and he came very close to dying. We were talking about the story of Jacob and Jacob's struggle. And the man said, "I know that struggle, because in my dark night I found myself wrestling and wondering, 'Is God's purpose for me good? Can I trust God? Can I count on God for whatever the future holds?' And I found myself crying out, and in the days that followed I knew that deep inside of my being in that encounter with God in the darkness and in the aloneness, something had changed in me. And I had found new strength and new hope and new comfort, but something else had changed. In my woundedness," he said, "I realized that all my life I'd been wounding other people. I'd been competitive, I'd wanted to succeed, and so in doing that, in seeking that success I'd wounded my wife, my colleagues, my children. In my own night of struggle and wounding I discovered that I did not want to wound anymore, that I wanted not to be a wounder, but a wounded healer."

That is Jacob's message to us. That is God's encouragement to us. We are those who know what it is to struggle whether it's physical illness or relationships that are broken or tough circumstances in a hurting and suffering world. We're fearful, but then finally we realize that God, who knows our name, cares about us and loves us. As we wrestle and as we struggle with our doubts and our fears, we discover that God is good and God is for us, and God gives us a promise of a good future, a promise of hope - a blessing.

As we enter into that promise we discover that we are those who know what it is to follow a wounded savior, Jesus Christ, who died for us, bearing our wounds that we might live abundant life and eternal life, and follow Him into the world with joy and hope, as wounded healers. May it be so with us. Amen.

Roberta Hestenes: Bill Moyers.

Talbot: And you have recently completed work for public television on a twelve part series with Bill Moyers on religion.

Hestenes: We're actually working on the book of Genesis and the stories that are so wonderful from that book, which so deeply inform our own faith tradition.

Talbot: Well, I must ask you, how did you perceive the way that Bill Moyers is informed by his faith in dealing with that personal woundedness and for you, how does your faith inform you?

Hestenes: What we had in common was our faith and our love for the book of Genesis - but we had both had heart attacks. His had been about a year ago and mine had been just this summer.

Talbot: What kind of dialogue with God did you have?

Hestenes: We were interacting with what it's like when you're relatively young, facing the kind of threat that a heart attack can bring and thinking, where am I, what is God doing with me, what's the future, can I really trust, and can I live with confidence even in the midst of physical failure or need? You really do wrestle and you struggle with those things. And the good news, I mean both of us had experienced but I'll speak for myself, is to discover the presence of God with you, the comfort of God with you. In my particular case it turned out the heart attack was very mild, there was no damage and recovery has been very rapid.

Talbot: And so sustained by your faith, but Roberta, you also know about global woundedness first hand. You were the first woman named to the board of World Vision International and you must tell us about some of your experience with those pockets of pain around the world.

Hestenes: Well, one of the things that you discover when you begin working with people in great poverty, who live on the edge of starvation or with malnourishment, with very limited resources or natural disasters or the victims of war, is that you do not serve in those circumstances without knowing something of the pain and suffering, and entering into that with people.

My first major experience with that was in the famine camps of Ethiopia, to see the bodies of the babies, and their mothers who had given everything they had to try and save their children and their children were not saved. And then to know that you could, with the foundation of faith, the belief that God does not want that, enter into that and make a difference.

Talbot: Make a difference and discover the pockets of hope! Where are they?

Hestenes: In people! In people who are willing to give, in people willing to go, and people who don't turn their eyes away from the need in the world but face into it. And in facing into it do, sometimes very little things, but the necessary things that really do matter.

Talbot: Really do matter, and you are doing it. You are one of those people, Roberta Hestenes. Thank you for your inspirational message to us.