Monday’s Mission Moment from chinaconnect
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My dad would have celebrated his 92nd birthday onOctober 15. And of the many things that I remember as a child growing up was my father’s love of watching wrestling on television. We kids would always tease him about watching a program that was so phony. Before Hulk Hogan was big, the personalities I remember were named Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Jesse “the Body” Ventura, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, the Junkyard Dog, King Kong Bundy, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, and the Ultimate Warrior. The names of these wrestlers painted a picture for me of their character, of what they might be like. My dad loved all these guys and believed every wrestling move they performed was real.
As I read through Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with a stranger (perhaps an Angel of God or God himself), and with a slick move reminiscent of wrestling’s great heroes, the stranger throws out Jacob’s hip. And at the end of this struggle, Jacob is given a new name, no longer supplanter (meaning “to take the place of” or sometimes translated as cheat) but Israel, “one who has wrestled with God and humans and has prevailed”. Israel will go on to birth a nation whose descendants will also struggle with God…refusing to give up or to let go of God.
Names are important, aren’t they? They paint a picture of the kind of person, perhaps the character, parents hope they may grow up to be. My name in Greek means “crown” and in Chinese the name given to me by my first language teacher means “Thunder Innocence and Grace”. I like both of these names. I suppose they say something about me, perhaps names that I may grow into one day. But at my baptism, like Jacob, God gave me a new name: child of God. And I suppose this is the name that means the most. For this name carries with it the certain joy of knowing that I am God’s: loved and chosen, flawed and redeemed, sinner and saint. A name, perhaps, we all struggle to live into from time to time because we know of the sacrifice God gave to bestow upon us this name.
Grace and peace,
Steve