Today’s passage is Genesis 29:21-35. Jacob completes his seven years and has a wedding feast. Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel. He gets Rachel in return for another seven years labor. Leah bears four sons, naming them in reference to God, hoping for Jacob’s love. Rachel is barren.
What affliction are you enduring through God’s grace?
How have you failed to see God’s rule for you in your situation?
Before Jacob was born, God said his brother would serve him, but instead of waiting on the Lord, he forced the issue.
At Paddan Aram, he didn’t check to see what the marriage rule was, nor did Laban tell him because he was a cheater just like Jacob.
All Jacob did to his credit was show grit for fourteen years, a perseverance God wanted him to learn, but he didn’t understand. I, too, have the same selfish impatience as Jacob.
When I was 12, I was offered a place on the Canadian national swim team.
The officials went to my parents naturally, not me, and my parents declined the opportunity on my behalf without telling me.
I only learned about it a couple of years ago when my mother told me.
She said that because the training center was on the other side of the country, it was unthinkable that I should leave home just to become a champion.
I didn’t challenge her because I know the deeper reason she didn’t want me to go.
But all my life I’ve wondered how far I might have gone if I had had the training I needed at that time.
My wife and I watched the movie Eddie the Eagle about the unlikely Olympic ski jumper from Britain.
She asked me why I never competed in the Olympics.
Without realizing I was making excuses for myself, I explained that when my family moved to Ottawa, there were only two pools in the entire city and the swim teams in them practiced once a week with coaches who knew close to nothing about competitive swimming at my level.
So, after a couple of years of no real training and not even any competition with other cities, I quit.
It was at the end of my seventh year of competitive swimming. Like Jacob, I worked for seven years but didn’t see the prize.
My wife’s question made me realize that, unlike Eddie the Eagle ski jumper, I did not have the passion or the drive to push my parents to get me the training once we landed in the desert of swimming facilities in Ottawa.
With no one to pull me, I couldn’t find the push inside me. I didn't see that, without the daily discipline of swimming training and competition, I got lost.
God called me in the midst of my greatest suffering during graduate school and started me on a long path of God-allowed affliction, not unlike Jacob’s, because I didn’t take time to wait for him my Lord.
I rushed ahead with my worldly desires. I wanted Rachel when all the time Leah was there with sons.
I didn’t see that I was a teacher until desperate circumstances dropped my first teaching job into my lap.
I didn't see I was a writer, and what kind of writer, until I laid down my fantasy of being CS Lewis.
I didn't see that not only was I an English teacher but I was also an educator called to build a school until I nearly failed at it after being thrust into the position of principal, trusting too much in myself. I didn’t see, I didn’t see, just like Jacob.
Application: Pray for God’s guidance and inspiration for my school every day and write down what I hear through the Lord’s word in the daily passage, keeping a journal of listening.
Lord, let me not run after Rachel’s, so drunk with desire that I can’t even see the Leah you have given me.
