Me vs. God

My church likes to stress the importance of 'entering into the story' when it comes to stepping into a verse/chapter of the Bible. To actually venture into it and feel it. Not just read it and move along. After a study of Genesis 32:24, I felt like I had truly truly truly entered the story and this is easily the most difficult and self-invasive blog I have ever written. Although I like to think I am a good person and know for a fact without a doubt that I am not an easy person to get to know. I do NOT let people in. I'm trying to do better but it is going to take a lot on my end to let walls down that have been built up and fortified since I was a kid.

Summing the story up quickly, Jacob was a man constantly blessed by God. Even with all the the blessings raining down on him, he still resists fully accepting God and continues to just fully depend on himself. Getting tired of it, God comes down to earth as a man, grapples with Jacob all night long, countering one another's techniques until God breaks Jacob's hip. After this, God blesses Jacob once again with a new name (Israel). Jacob/Israel then carries on in life with a new attitude and a new way.

So. I've always believed in God. Always. But it was more of because my parents believed strongly in it and their parents believed even more strongly in it so I suppose that just meant it was real. So I went with it. Evenso, going to church, saying I was Christian, going to church-camp and being in the church choir, I was not a good kid. In middle school I was lazy, deceptive, sneaky and a liar. I was constantly in ISS at school, constantly in fist-fights, always staying after school for punishment. In high school, I was cunning, unfaithful with girlfriends and a bully. Constantly trying to start fights with upper-classmen and prove some sort of dominace. To my parents, I was a liar, a cheat, and super disrepectful. My mom locked me out of the house many nights where I had to sleep in the Camaro for staying out too late at a girls or with some friends. She even kicked me out of the house where I had to live with my uncle for a while because of my ways. Oh, but I went to church and was Christian.

Then came 1998. This was the time of my Awakening. This was the time of my coming into reality of what a Christian was. This, is how my fight with God went. I was at my friend's house after another argument with my mom. He was practicing in the backyard with his new 9iron golfclub and unaware of my approach, swung full-on and connected directly into my face. I remember the smack and crunching sound at the same time and then I remember the thud as my body in slow-motion Matrix-style collided with the earth. All senses enhightened, I still remember the warmth of the blood filling my mouth, nose and soaking my shirt. I remember hearing him crying and screaming and his dad running out onto his deck and descending down the stairs and hugging me to his chest. I remember not blacking out but wanting to so the pain would go away and I remember freezing even though the EMT team told me I was loaded with blankets. I remember feeling my face get fatter and thicker and my heartrate beating so loud it was making my head scream and any source of light made me cry because it was so blinding through my closed and concealed eyes. This, was in essence, my hip dislocation which God blessed me with.

In the hospital, relearning how to walk, judge distance, be able to reach things and adjust to the lack of depth perception, God's children visited me, stayed with me, talked to me, and prayed for me. This incident, which doctors still claim should had killed me, has been the reason I am the person I am today. It took multiple facial reconstruction surgeries, attemptive eye repair and finally eye removal to make me finally open up my heart and eyes and see the world the way I was supposed to be seeing it. I was blessed by this. So much. By His action, God has crippled but uncrippled me. I hope not everyone has to wrestle with Him the way I did but I truly hope if you haven't that you do in some form. I'm living healthier and happier now. I know that I will even live happier when I learn to finally let these walls down which shield my heart from others...