The Stairway in the Wilderness

Jacob was running.

Do you know that feeling? When you have done something wrong, and now you are far from home, and you are not sure anyone wants you anymore? That was Jacob. He had tricked his blind old father and stolen his brother's blessing, and now he was alone in a wide, empty land, with the dark coming down.

He had no bed out there, no mother nearby, no door to shut against the night.

So Jacob found a stone. A cold, hard stone. He laid his head on it like a pillow, and he closed his eyes. He must have felt so small. He thought, surely God is back there, where the warm houses are. Surely God could not be way out here, with me.

Jacob was wrong about that.

While he slept, a dream came, and the dream was full of light.

There, rising up out of that lonely ground, was a great stairway. It climbed and climbed, past the clouds, past the stars, all the way up into heaven. And on the stairway were the angels of God, going up and coming down, up and down, up and down, as if the stairway were a bright bridge that had been there all along, hidden, and nobody knew.

At the very top stood God himself.

A boy who had run away might expect an angry voice. "How dare you." "Go home, you have made a mess of everything."

Instead, God said, "I am with you." He said, "I will keep you wherever you go. I will not leave you. I will bring you home again." And he gave Jacob the same promise he had given, long before, to his grandfather Abraham on the day he called him away from home: one day, through this family, every family on the whole earth would be blessed. Even the families of runaways.

Then Jacob woke up. His heart was pounding. He looked around at the same wilderness, the same stone, the same dark, and now he understood.

"God was here," he whispered, "and I did not even know it. This is the very gate of heaven."

He took the hard stone, the one he had cried on, and stood it up tall, so that anyone who passed that way would know: God met someone here. The promise had already found this lonely place, and the best of it was still on its way.

Because that stairway, that shining bridge between heaven and one frightened, lonely person, was a promise dressed up as a dream. One day Jesus would come, and he would say, "I am the stairway. I am the way up and the way home." Heaven and earth, joined together. God and you, with nothing in between.

When morning came, Jacob got up and walked on, deeper into the wide land, toward his uncle's far-off house, where two sisters lived whom he had never met. He did not know what was waiting for him there. But he walked like a boy who had seen the gate of heaven, with God going beside him every step.