What’s Your Name?

“God doesn’t particularly value goody-good people. God loves bad people — deceiving, doubting, despairing, troubled people; loud-mouths and shiftless ones who get ahead by hook and crook — such are the covenant people God seeks out and passionately wants to save if they put up a fight for life when they get into a jam.

Could it be a terrible good when our country is faced by the implacable (Vietnam) war — I pray that some of you get into a jam soon; one so bad you don’t know where to go except to pray, all alone, foxhole-type prayers which God hears — so that when God’s Angel confronts you, you will grab hold and fight savagely, weep and plead for help until God’s Angel hurts you, somehow. Getting hurt by God seems to give a person the grace to answer truthfully when asked, ‘What’s your name? What’s your line?’ Such a person can say, ‘My name is self-seeker, hothead, loafer — What’s your name?’

And when such confession of guilt is wrong out of someone, God changes their name. Maybe they limp ever after, but what is that compared to having wrestled with the living God and having received God’s touch of blessing!”

-Seerveld on Genesis 32:22-31, in Take Hold of God and Pull