Wrestling. Both my sons were high school wrestlers. My oldest wrestles in college, and my brother is a high school wrestling coach. I have sat for hours and hours on hard metal bleachers and watched hundreds of wrestling matches. "Sat" and "watched" are actually rather passive verbs for the mother of a wrestler; a match can be an excruciating six minutes, and I seldom stayed seated for the whole time.
I like wrestling as a metaphor for the Christian life because it is an all-in kind of sport. Half-way committed wrestlers do not last because no one wants to lie flat on his back with his opponent on top of him in a gym full of spectators on a regular basis. Hence, the young men I know who stick with wrestling commit themselves to hours of rigorous preparation off the mat and train themselves to focus mind and body on the mat.
I appreciate Oswald's distinction between wrestling with and wrestling before God. Although I have used the former expression, I can see the ridiculousness of it. Wrestlers are matched by weight, and even then, when one is considerably stronger and/or more experienced, the match is over within seconds. No 103-pounder is going to voluntarily walk onto the mat with a heavyweight, and the heavyweight would have little satisfaction from pinning a wrestler one-third his weight. (I'm still trying to understand the significance of Jacob's story in this context, as his example has always seemed to advocate wrestling with God; but perhaps I have underestimated the damage his hip suffered. Certainly, to walk with a limp the remainder of his life was no trifle.)
Either way, however, the message to me is clear: I am not to be a jellyfish, passively acknowledging the "will of God." I am to be a wrestler -- passionate, committed, always in training, sometimes beaten and humiliated, but never half-hearted.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places," Eph. 6:12.
Leave it all on the mat.
Barbara
BK-I love the wrestling with God idea--I don't get how I could ever score a point on Him--but I do like the "--passion, committed, always in training...but never half hearted. I would like to be like that...
ReplyDeleteBarb, I have not given this a lot of thought and I have not read the devotional that this blog is commenting on. When considering the concept of wrestling with God I think it must be considered in light of the knowledge that God is the absolute king of everything that is, and that nothing which happens which he has not decreed. If that is the case, which I believe it to be, then aren't we in essence wrestling with God whenever we struggle in our minds with the reality of life. This struggle with reality is with the reality of our personal lives but also with the reality of the universe, as we know it. Hey I might be way off on all of this and if so I am sorry. I just read your blog and wanted to comment on it. In my mind all of life is a wrestling match. As you said all the moms and dads in the stands wrestle every match with their sons and sometimes with their daughters. We also wrestle to get out of bed in the morning. We wrestle to do our job to the best of our abilities. We wrestle with doubt. We wrestle with our friendships, we wrestle for our friends, we wrestle in prayer, or in an effort to pray. We wrestle to love our enemies. We wrestle to have hope, as I said before we wrestle with accepting the sovereign plan of God. Ironically we also wrestle with surrendering our lives to God's will and accepting that he loves us not because of who we are but unconditionally. Barb if I went on to long I am sorry. It is late and I am just writing the thoughts as they come to my head.
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