My hip hurts. I may have pushed too hard on a recent project around the house. It might be a tight tendon; I have printouts of articles on how to stretch the tendons. It will be a stretch for me to remember where I put the documents. It might just be age, too. It is nowhere near the painkiller stage, much less Cortisone shot or surgery.  I feel sure that I just need to change some of the ways that I’m doing things and the pain will go away.

Perhaps the pain was caused by my own personal wrestling with God and what He has in mind for my life. Not as dramatic as Jacob’s encounter (Genesis 32:22-32), but a true-life, day-to-day wrestling that I (and I suppose you, too) have trying to come to terms with life and living as God wants me to.  It’s a battle, and that’s okay. 

The Bible reminds us of how life is for everyone, whether we are more akin to a king or more similar to the beggar on the street. The people in the Bible– and all their fears, foibles, victories and vanquishments –illustrate the norm of the human condition and all its struggles; they are not the exceptions to the rule. We can find in almost every chapter of the Bible some similarity to one aspect or another of our own character or life.

So, my hip hurts. Was I wrestling with God? Not like Jacob, but certainly like Dion. Is that where the pain came from or does the pain remind me of Jacob which then reminds me that changing the way I do things may be good for more than my hip…it will be good for my soul, too.