Have you struggled with God?  Most of us have.  How could we not?  God is infinite and omniscient, we are limited and finite.  We rarely understand why life is the way it is or why things happen as they do.  We usually have no answers to the puzzles and conundrums that enter and inhabit our lives with such regularity.  So we wrestle and struggle with the person whom we think does:  God.
     Oddly enough, however, in a curious but telling way, God expects us to struggle with him.  Ask Jacob.  As Genesis tells it, Jacob had a lengthy and tumultuous journey with God.  He was was a person who, though he believed in God, seemed to do everything he could to get away from him.
     In chapter 32, however, we read that, after many years of troubles and travails, Jacob ends up on the River Jabbok, where he spends the night wrestling with a man who, it turns out, is actually God.
     In the morning, as God takes his leave, Jacob asks for, as he had often done before, a blessing.  And God blesses him by renaming him Israel, which means, "one who struggles with God."  God recognized Jacob's nature and character, his life, his reality.  God understoood that Jacob, like all of us, struggled with him, that he struggled with God because he didn't always see where God was taking him, didn't always see why God was doing what he was doing, didn't always see the big picture of his life the way that only God could.  God understood that Jacob, like all of us, struggle with our trials and limitations, trials and limitations which we often think, for better or worse, only have explanation in God.
     Do not think you will never struggle with God, for you inevitably will.  It's intrinsic to our humanness.  God expects us to struggle, indeed, God embraces our struggle.  And, happily, even though God expects and embraces our struggle, God, precisely because he is omnipotent and omniscient, is fully able to work with us, any time, any place, to help us through it, to guide and uphold us as we travel through the uncertainties and hardships of this existence.
     As the late Pope John Paul II, observed, it is our struggles with finitude that underscore the fact of our transcendence, the fact of our existence in a meaningful and created universe.  Go ahead and struggle:  God is big enough to wrestle with anything you have.