A Stone for a Pillow
Is there a place in your life you're sure God wasn't present: a hard night, a lonely stretch, a season you'd rather forget? What if he was there, and you simply didn't know it yet?
“Jacob awakened out of his sleep, and he said, ‘Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I didn’t know it.’ He was afraid, and said, ‘How dreadful is this place! This is none other than God’s house, and this is the gate of heaven.’ Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil on its top.”Genesis 28:16-18
Jacob is running. He has deceived his blind father and taken his brother's blessing, and Esau has sworn to kill him (Genesis 27:41). So he heads north toward his mother's family in Haran, alone, carrying little more than a staff. At sundown he stops near a town called Luz, takes one of the stones of the place, and puts it under his head. It's hard to picture a lonelier night. Then he dreams of a stairway set on the earth and reaching to heaven (the Hebrew word appears only here in the Bible, so "ladder" and "stairway" are both honest attempts), with angels going up and down on it. Yahweh stands above it and repeats the promise he gave Abraham and Isaac, and then adds a promise just for Jacob: "I am with you, and will keep you, wherever you go" (28:15). Jacob has done nothing to earn this. He wakes up shaken. The place he thought was nowhere turns out to be "the gate of heaven."
In the ancient world, people set up standing stones to mark a boundary, a covenant or a holy place, and pouring oil on one set it apart. Jacob takes the very stone he slept on, the stone of his worst night, and stands it up as a witness. He renames the town Bethel, "house of God." Twenty years later, coming home with a family and flocks, he prays, "I am not worthy of the least of all the loving kindnesses... for with just my staff I crossed over this Jordan" (32:10). That word is hesed, God's loyal, covenant love, the love that keeps its promise even to a schemer on the run. Bethel is where Jacob first tasted it. And his words on waking press right on our question: God was not absent from that hard ground. Jacob just didn't know it.
Most of us have a stone like Jacob's. A hospital waiting room. A borrowed couch after a marriage ended. A long drive home from a job that's gone. We tend to measure God's nearness by how things feel, so we assume the lonely places are the empty ones. Jacob's confession quietly unsettles that: "Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I didn't know it." Not knowing didn't make God absent. Some of us are still lying on the stone tonight, waiting for any sign at all. Others can look back now and see that the worst night held a stairway. Up here in the mountains you find cairns along the trail, stones stacked by someone who passed this way before you. Jacob's pillar is a kind of cairn. It says: this is where God met me, while I was running, before I deserved anything.
Think of a place or season in your life you would call a "nowhere" place. Looking back, is there any sign that God was there and you didn't know it? If you were to set up a stone there, what would you want it to say?
Faithful God, you met Jacob on hard ground when he had nothing to offer you, and you kept your promise to him for twenty years. Open my eyes to the places where you have been with me and I didn't know it. Where I am lying on a stone tonight, keep me as you kept him, wherever I go. Thank you for your steadfast love that holds on to me even when I'm running. Amen.