— When I Saw Your Face

Morning came over the Jabbok.
Jacob lifted his eyes, and there was Esau, with four hundred men raising dust behind him.

The night of wrestling was over, but another night still lived in him.
Fear remembers everything, the way a scar remembers the knife.

He divided his family and his flocks, and hid the ones he loved most at the back.
Then he went forward alone, limping, and bowed seven times into the dust.

But Esau ran.
He did not bring a sword. He opened his arms, fell on his brother’s neck, and kissed him, and both of them wept.

Twenty years of ice broke in one embrace.
Reconciliation needs no speech at first, only two wounded people standing face to face at last.

“Who are these?” Esau asked.
“The children God has graciously given,” Jacob said, and what he once grasped with his fist now lay in his open hand.

“I have enough, my brother.”
The robbed one says enough, and the old theft dissolves like salt in the river.

“Please accept my gift, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.”
Last night he saw God at Peniel and lived. This morning the same face looked at him through his brother’s eyes.

The mirror of the heart, once wiped clean, shows the Beloved everywhere,
even in the one we ran from and in the face we feared most.

We do not find God by escaping the one who wounded us.
Sometimes the veil is thinnest where the old wound is deepest.

“Go on ahead,” Jacob said. “I will walk slowly, at the pace of the children and the nursing lambs.”
Peace does not have to walk the same road. It is love without control, forgiveness that remembers the past honestly.

Esau turned toward Seir, and Jacob toward Succoth.
They did not become what they had been, but the hatred no longer ruled the road.

He built shelters for the flocks, then an altar at Shechem, and called it El-Elohe-Israel, God, the God of Israel.
The name was new, the man was new, and the limp remained.

The wound is where the light enters.
Blessing does not take our wounds away. It pours through them, like lamplight through the crack in a clay jar.

He had died at the river before he died, and the grasping self lay buried in the Jabbok’s stones.
Now, emptied, he could receive what he had spent his life trying to seize.

The night changed him, and the morning showed it.
A drop that had fought the ocean all night let go at dawn and found it was already home.

Note: This is what coming home means.
We do not go back to who we were. We walk forward with our wounds, until the face we feared becomes the face through which God teaches us to see.

God who wrestles with us in the dark and meets us in the morning, empty our clenched hands so we can receive Your grace.
Wipe the mirror of our hearts until Your face shines in the brother and sister we have feared.
Teach us to say enough, and to walk at the pace of the smallest among us.
Let light enter through our wounds, until every road between us is free.