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Someone bumps him—a man? an angel?—and Jacob does what he has always done. He fights as if his life depends on it. All night the two wrestle, neither gaining the advantage, until at last the first gleam of daybreak brightens the horizon. "Let me go," the figure says, reaching down with a touch so potent it wrenches Jacob's hip socket.

Staggering, overpowered, scared out of his wits, Jacob still manages to hang on. "I will not let you go unless you bless me," he tells the figure. Instead of wrenching his neck with another touch, the figure tenderly bestows on Jacob a new name, Israel, which means "God-wrestler." At last, Jacob learns the identity of his opponent.

A little later, Jacob sees his brother Esau approaching with 400 men and limps forward to meet him. Their own wrestling match began before birth, a tussle in utero. And now the moment of truth has arrived. God-wrestler holds out his arms.

A contemporary Jewish author, Arthur Waskow, wrote in his book Godwrestling that wrestling feels a lot like making love—and like making war. Jacob felt some of each, making love and making war, with the elusive figure in the night and with hairy Esau in the day. From a distance, it's hard to distinguish a stranglehold from a hug.

God does not give in easily. Yet at the same time, God seems to welcome the persistence that keeps on fighting long after the match has been decided. Perhaps Jacob learned for the first time, that long night by the riverside, how to transform struggle into love. "To see your face is like seeing the face of God," Jacob told his brother, words unimaginable had he not met God face to face the night before.

Although Jacob did many things wrong in life, he became the eponym for a tribe and a nation as well as for all of us who wrestle with God. We are all children of Israel, implied Paul, all of us God-wrestlers who cling to God in the dark, who chase God from room to room, who declare, "I will not let you go." To us belong the blessing, the birthright, the kingdom.

"Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of a wrestler with God," concluded E. M. Bounds, who wrote eight books on prayer. Our no-holds-barred outbursts hardly threaten God, and sometimes they even seem to change him.

As the touch on Jacob's hip socket proved, God could have ended the match at any point during that long night in the desert. Instead, the elusive figure lingered, as eager to be held as Jacob was to hold.

This excerpt has been adapted from Philip Yancey's latest book, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (Zondervan).

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Yancey's Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? is available from ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

Books & Culture , a Christianity Today sister publication also excerpted the book. Today's Christian, another sister publication, interviewed Yancey. Publishers Weekly's Religion Bookline also interviewed Yancey about the book.

Zondervan's site for the book includes an author tour schedule and an excerpt.

More on prayer is available from our Prayer & Spirituality full coverage area.

A decade of Yancey's Christianity Todaycolumns are available on our site.

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October 2006, Vol. 50, No. 10