Night reading · Genesis 28:16
A stone for a pillow
Jacob at Bethel · Genesis 28
Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.
Genesis 28:16 · King James Version
It is late, and the light has gone out of the hills.
A man is walking away from home with nothing. He has a staff, and the clothes he stands in, and a family he has damaged so badly that he cannot go back. His name is Jacob. He has cheated his brother and lied to his father, and now he is running, and the running has taken him further than he meant to go.
The sun sets. He cannot walk in the dark, so he stops.
There is no inn. There is no fire. There is no one. There is open ground, and stones, and the enormous quiet that comes down on a country road when the last of the light goes.
So he does the only thing there is to do. He takes one of the stones of that place, and he puts it under his head, and he lies down in that place to sleep.
Think about that for a moment. A stone. Not a complaint, not a plan, not a prayer — a stone, and the ground, and a man too tired to arrange anything better.
And he sleeps.
And while he is asleep — while he is doing nothing at all, contributing nothing, deserving nothing — heaven opens over the top of him.
He dreams. And in the dream there is a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are going up and down on it. Up and down. Quiet traffic between the ground he is lying on and the heaven he thought was somewhere else entirely.
And above it all, a voice. Not angry. Not a lecture about his brother, or his father, or the lie.
I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee.
I am with thee. I will keep thee. In all places. Whither thou goest.
He wakes up in the dark with his heart going, and he says the sentence that has been said by everyone who has ever discovered this: Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.
He did not know. That is the part worth carrying into sleep tonight. He did not know. He thought he was alone on a road in the dark with a stone under his head, and the whole time the place he had stopped in was the gate of heaven.
You may not know either.
You may be further from home than you meant to be. You may have stopped somewhere you never planned to stop. The arrangements may be poor, and the ground may be hard, and there may be nobody who knows exactly where you are tonight.
The ladder is still there.
You do not have to climb it. Jacob did not climb it. He slept at the bottom of it while it was busy above him, and in the morning he got up and went on, and God did every single thing He said He would do — over twenty long years, most of which did not look like it at the time.
So put the day down now. All of it. The part you handled badly. The part that was done to you. The conversation you keep rewriting.
Let the stone be a stone.
The LORD is in this place. He was before you noticed, and He will be when you stop noticing, and He will still be there in the morning.
Sleep now.
I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.