You Are Not Alone
He was running for his life.
It was night in the wilderness north of Beersheba. The hills were bare. The rocks were sharp. The wind moved across the dust the way wind moves over things that have been left.
Jacob was alone.
He had stolen the blessing meant for his brother. Esau had vowed to kill him. His mother had sent him fleeing in the dark with nothing but the clothes on his back and the name of an uncle in a country he had never seen.
The road from home to Haran is more than four hundred miles. He had walked maybe forty.
He was tired. He was scared. He was alone.
It got dark.
There was no inn. No fire. No friend.
He looked around the field. He picked up a stone.
He laid it on the ground. He laid his head on it.
That was his pillow.
The ground was hard. The wind was cold. The dark was complete.
Anyone who has had a night like that knows what kind of night it is. The kind where the dark feels like it has weight. The kind where you can hear your own heartbeat. The kind where you wonder if anyone, anywhere, even knows where you are.
Jacob closed his eyes on that stone.
And then God showed up.
In a dream, Jacob saw a ladder. Its foot rested on the dirt where he was sleeping. Its top reached into heaven.
Angels were on it. Going up. Coming down. A traffic of heaven moving over the head of a fugitive on a stone in a field.
And the LORD stood above the ladder.
He spoke.
He said: I am the LORD God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac.
He said: The land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.
He said: Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land.
He said: I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
A man on the run from his brother. A man with no home. A man with a rock for a pillow.
And God says: I am with you.
Jacob woke up.
The sky was still dark. The stone was still under his head. The wilderness was still wilderness.
But something inside him was different.
He sat up in the dirt. He looked around at the field he had been sleeping in. The same field. The same wind. The same loneliness.
And he said the line that should change the way you and I read every difficult chapter of our lives.
"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it."
— Genesis 28:16 (NKJV)
He did not say the LORD has come to this place.
He said the LORD is in this place.
Present tense.
He had been there the whole time.
Jacob took the stone he had used for a pillow.
He set it up on its end.
He poured oil on it.
He named the place Bethel — house of God.
The same field where he had cried himself to sleep the night before became, by morning, a sanctuary.
Nothing had changed but his eyes.
There is a thing the Bible keeps showing us about the presence of God.
He is not where we expect Him to be.
He is in a burning bush in the back of the desert, where Moses is just trying to keep his sheep alive.
He is in a still small voice in a cave, where Elijah has run to die.
He is in a manger in Bethlehem, where there was no room.
He is on a wooden floor in the New Hebrides, while two missionaries pray through the night.
And He is in a field with one stone, where a man on the run lies down with nothing.
The presence of God does not wait for the cathedral. He does not wait for the worship band. He does not wait for the season of your life when you finally feel ready.
He shows up in the dirt.
He shows up in the rock.
He shows up in the dark.
I do not know what your field looks like tonight.
But I want you to stop reading for a second and let yourself name it. Don't say it out loud if you can't. Just let your heart say it.
Maybe your field is a hospital waiting room, and the doctor's face when he came back through the doors was not the face you were praying for. Maybe you are the one in the bed.
Maybe your field is a house that has gone quiet — quieter than it was supposed to be at this season of your life. There was supposed to be a child. There was supposed to be a husband. There was supposed to be more noise than this. The silence is what you cannot bear.
Maybe your field is a marriage that does not feel like home anymore. You are in the same bed and you are a thousand miles apart. You don't know what happened. You don't know how to fix it. You don't know if he or she even wants to fix it. And you are tired of pretending it's fine.
Maybe your field is a child who walked out the door of the faith you raised them in, and you have been praying for them every night for years, and you are starting to wonder if anybody is hearing those prayers anymore.
Maybe your field is a bank account that doesn't add up, and a stack of bills that won't stop coming, and a job that may or may not exist next month. You smile at church. You don't tell anyone. You are drowning quietly.
Maybe your field is a memory that won't let you go. Something you did. Something that was done to you. The kind of thing you have never said out loud to anybody, because you are afraid of what they would think of you if they knew. The shame sits on your chest like a weight that does not lift.
Maybe your field is the slow, grinding exhaustion of being the strong one for everybody else, and there is no one — no one — strong for you.
Maybe your field is the bottle in the cabinet, or the pill in the bathroom, or the screen in the dark, and you have promised yourself a hundred times that this would be the last time, and tonight you are not so sure anymore.
Maybe your field is the funeral you went to last week, and the chair at the table that is empty now, and the way you walk past their old room and forget for one second and then remember and have to lean against the wall.
Maybe your field is a season of God's silence so long you have started to wonder if He is even there. You have not stopped praying — you just don't know if anyone is on the other end of the line.
Whatever your field is, hear me.
He is in this place.
You may not know it.
He is.
He was there before you laid down. He is there now while you are reading this. He will be there when you finally close your eyes tonight, whether sleep comes or not.
You are not as alone as you feel.
The dark you are in has a witness.
The stone under your head has a name on it, and it is not yours alone — it is His.
The thing about Bethel is that Jacob did not build it.
He did not lay a foundation.
He did not carve an altar.
He took the stone that had been under his head while he slept — the very thing that had pressed into his ear during his loneliest night — and he stood it up.
The hard place became the holy place.
The thing that hurt him became the thing he poured oil on.
The pillow of his pain became the pillar of his praise.
That is what the presence of God does to a wilderness. He doesn't always remove it. Sometimes He stands it up on its end and turns it into an altar.
The thing that was killing you slowly will, in time, be the thing you tell other people about and they will weep because they needed to hear it.
The midnight you are afraid you will not survive will, one day, be the chapter of your life that gives someone else permission to keep going.
The empty chair will not stay only an empty chair.
The bank account will not be the last word.
The child you are praying for is not too far away for the same God who stood at the top of Jacob's ladder.
Years later, Jacob would limp back across that same country, no longer running, no longer alone.
He would meet Esau again — and instead of a sword, there would be an embrace.
He would father a nation.
He would die an old man with the blessing of God on his children's heads.
But the moment everything turned was not the moment Esau forgave him.
It was the night he laid down on a stone, and woke up to find that he had not been alone after all.
"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it."
— Genesis 28:16 (NKJV)
Wherever you are reading this — He is in this place.
The field is His.
The stone is His.
The dark is His.
And so are you.
He has not left you.
He never did.
A meditation on Genesis 28 and the presence of God.
Bolivar Church · #PresenceOfGod · #OpenHeavens
