“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”
Genesis 32.28
This is the grace of it: It is exactly to the empty-hearted, the empty-handed, the desolate, that God comes. It is exactly into our exhausted, depleted selves, that he comes. In the half-light of morning, Jesus comes to us – his own face wrecked and his own feet limping from the suffering of his crucifixion, but bearing in his love the power of the resurrection, for us.