I Will Not Let You Go

She stopped in June and she has not told anybody.

Not stopped praying. She prays every day and she means it and there is nothing wrong with the rest of her prayer life. She stopped praying about the one thing.

Eleven years she asked. Every form of asking there is. The polite ones, the desperate ones, the ones where she fasted, the ones at two in the morning, the ones where she stood in a room and declared things because somebody had told her that was how it worked, and the ones where she just said the name and could not add anything else.

And in June, on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing particular happening, she noticed that she had not asked for about a week, and then she noticed that she was not going to.

It was not a decision made in anger. That would be cleaner and easier to talk about in a testimony. It was simply that the holding on had become heavier than she could carry alongside everything else, and something in her hand opened.

And what she carries now is not grief exactly. It is a low shame that she does not have words for, because in every story she has ever heard about persistence, the person kept holding on, and she is the woman who did not.

He held on all night and he did not come out of it unmarked

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me (Genesis 32:26).

That is the sentence everybody quotes, and it is usually quoted as a piece of encouragement, and I want to put the whole scene back around it because the whole scene is what you actually need.

Jacob wrestles all night. Not for a few minutes and not with any dignity. All night, in the dark, at a river, alone, and the text is unembarrassed about how physical and undignified it is.

And when he finally says the famous line, he is not fresh. He has been at it for hours. And a verse earlier his hip has been put out of joint, which means he says I will not let thee go while injured.

And he walks away limping for the rest of his life.

You are looking at a story about holding on that never once pretends holding on is easy. That is what the text shows, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old wrestling match honest for a woman in her twelfth year, because Scripture says He helps our weakness, which is a phrase that assumes weakness rather than scolding it.

Letting go is not the same as unbelief

Now let me get at the shame, because it is the actual thing in the room and nobody has addressed it.

You believe that letting go was a failure of faith. That the story requires you to be the one who holds on, and you did not, and therefore something about you has been revealed.

But look at what actually happened in June. You did not decide God was not real. You did not conclude He would not do it. Your hand opened because it had been holding something heavy for eleven years alongside a job and a family and a body that is eleven years older than when you started.

That is exhaustion. Exhaustion is a physical state and not a verdict on a soul, and Scripture is not confused about the difference: it says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is the gentlest sentence in the whole book about the limits of a body.

You are not being assessed for what your hand did in June. The word says He gives power to the faint and to them that have no might He increases strength (Isaiah 40:29), which is a promise addressed specifically to people who have run out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than a woman finding a second wind.

Who was holding whom

And here is the thing about that night at the river that almost nobody notices.

The one Jacob was wrestling could have left at any point. He is the one who says let me go, which is a request from somebody who is entirely able to depart and is choosing not to. He touches Jacob's hip with what reads as almost no effort at all.

He stayed all night. He let a man hold on to Him. And then He blessed him.

So the story is not really a story about human tenacity, though it looks like one at first glance. It is a story about somebody who stayed until morning with a man who would not be reasonable, and who could have gone at any moment and did not.

You have been held by somebody who has not let go in the eleven years or in the eight months since. Scripture says He is faithful even when we are faithless, because He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person while they are not keeping anything at all.

And I will not oversell it, because you have had eleven years of people doing that. Nothing here says the thing you stopped asking for is coming. I do not know, and I am not going to hand you a prediction and call it a word. What is settled is that letting go in June is not the verdict you have been treating it as, and that somebody has stayed at the river the whole time.