One of my favorite passages in the Bible is in Genesis 32.  This is the story that most Bibles describe with the heading "Jacob wrestles with God".  The reason I enjoy this passage is because there is so much in there to learn and there is also a lot I don't really understand.  How does Jacob wrestle with God if God is Spirit?  Who was this man?  Was he an angel?  Why was Jacob so adamant about getting a blessing?  Why did he want to know the man's name?  It said the man/God blessed him, but what did that look like?  I've got a lot more questions where those came from, but let's look at what we can know about this story and Jacob's life.

Jacob wrestled all night against a man not realizing until dawn broke that it was God.
Jacob asked for a blessing and wouldn't let go of God until he got it.
Before he received his blessing, he suffered brokenness. (his hip was injured)
God didn't just break him, but also renamed him.
He left that encounter with God limping and probably limped the rest of his life.

Jacob had been a deceiver his whole life.  He deceived his father, cheated his brother, and deceived his father-in-law, who first deceived him.  He had many struggles in his life and struggled in what must have been the fight of his life, lasting all night, with God.  The Bible tells us he was alone and that they wrestled until daybreak, which means this struggle was in total darkness.  Maybe you can relate to feeling alone and dark in your struggles, not knowing that God is present.  In that overnight struggle God broke Jacob, renamed Jacob and blessed Jacob.  It's important for us to remember that our brokenness before God can lead to a purpose and destiny beyond it.  It is the very nature of God to allow us to become a new creation in Christ as we acknowledge our brokenness before Him and receive freely the gift of redemption through His Son.  God will always give us a new name/new identity as we struggle with Him.  He will speak newness into our circumstances, our marriage or our troubles. No matter how badly we've missed the mark, if we open ourselves up to God He will make sure we don't walk away from the encounter the same.

As chapter 32 of Genesis concludes we see a description of Jacob passing by the place where he struggled with God.  The sun has risen overhead and the Bible says he was limping.  "To this day", it says, "the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon."  They have a reverence for the limp.  If you're like me you probably have the tendency to want to hide those struggles in your life that have caused you to limp for fear that others might perceive that limp as weakness, lack of righteousness, or some other false assumption.  From experience I can tell you that with each moment of brokenness I have received blessing as I held tightly to God.  I wonder if maybe we shouldn't stop trying to hide the limp and instead let God's blessings pour into other's lives through our limp.