Jacob/Israel

We Struggle... and are Forever Changed

We bear the scars, internal and external, of our transformation. For to go unchanged, unmarked, is not the vision that God has for us, is not the sacred task that we have been given. We are Israel... and Ya'akov -- in our moments of doubt, our moments of unseeing, our moments of forgetting our highers selves, our transformed souls, our given names -- the one that changes us forever -- and even so, today, we still flip back and forth with our whole selves -- sometimes Israel, sometimes Ya'akov, and it changes us.

We notice the spaces between, we notice the fullness of the love within the spaces, and we struggle... struggle and go on, marked and changed, moving differently through the world, even as we struggle, even as we notice the luminous and the dark, the right now and the someday, the becoming, becoming, becoming whole that we all struggle with, searching to find our truest face turned toward God. And the times when we find ourselves turned around, to face once again who we have been, even as we wrestle to move ourselves back or forward into the way we are called to become.

And here we are: we are Israel, a people who wrestle with ourselves, with others, and with God, and we are able. Always remember: we are able. So we turn, marked in our way, toward wholeness.