Surely the Lord is in this place,
and I was not aware of it.Genesis 28:16 (NIV)

“When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’” — Genesis 28:16 (NIV)

He was not on a pilgrimage. He was running.

His brother wanted him dead and he had done enough to earn it, and he was walking north to relatives he had never met. He stopped where he stopped because the sun went down. He took one of the stones lying about, put it under his head, and slept the way you sleep when you are that tired. There is nothing in the account to suggest he thought anything of the place at all.

Then he woke, and the first thing he said was that God had been there the whole night and he had known nothing about it.

That is the part worth sitting with. Not the stairway, not the angels — the fact that it was true while he slept straight through it, and he only found out in the morning. Whatever was holding him up had been doing it long before he had any idea.

You have a place like that. A year you would not choose again. A house you were glad to leave. A stretch of months you have never described to anybody as anything but hard. Some of what was going on in it you are only working out now, and some of it you will not work out for a long while yet.

You do not have to be able to see it tonight. Jacob could not, and he was lying on top of it.