Surely the LORD Was in That Place and I Did Not Know It

I drove a man home from a funeral once and he told me he had lost eleven years.

That was his phrase. Lost. He did not mean he could not remember them. He meant that when he went back over his life, looking for God in it the way a person looks for a face in a crowd, there was a stretch from about thirty-one to about forty-two where he could not find Him anywhere.

He had gone to church in most of those years. He had prayed. Nothing scandalous had happened. He said that was almost the worst part, because there was nothing to point at and say that is where it went wrong. There was just a long flat stretch that he had come to think of as time God was not in.

He asked me what I thought a person does with eleven years like that, and I did not have an answer for him at the tailgate. I have one now, and it comes from a man who slept on a rock.

What he said when he woke up

Jacob is running. He has deceived his father, robbed his brother of a blessing, and left home in a hurry with what he could carry.

The text is careful about how unremarkable the campsite was. He stops because the sun went down, not because the place meant anything. He takes a stone for a pillow, which tells you everything about the standard of the accommodation.

And then, after the dream and the ladder and the voice, he wakes up and says the line.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. (Genesis 28:16, King James Version)

I knew it not. Not I doubted it. Not I had a hard time believing it. He had no idea. The presence of God and his awareness of it were two completely different facts, and only one of them was true that night.

You have been in rooms with Him that you filed as empty, and the filing was never what decided whether He was there, and Genesis 28 makes that separation in one sentence, and the Spirit is the one who eventually goes back and tells a person what was actually in the room.

Notice also what Jacob was in the middle of. He was not on a pilgrimage. He was fleeing the consequences of something he had done, and God met him inside that, without waiting for him to be somewhere more suitable.

Why a person cannot see it at the time

I want to be fair to the man at the tailgate, because there is nothing dishonest in what he was reporting.

Nobody can usually see providence from inside it. That is not a spiritual failing, it is a structural fact about being a creature in time. A thread only looks like a thread when there is enough of it behind a person to show a direction.

And there is a second reason, harder to say. The years a person writes off are usually the ordinary ones. Nothing collapsed and nothing shone. And we have been trained, mostly by testimonies, to identify God's presence with intensity, so a decade of ordinary Tuesdays gets read as absence when it was actually just quiet.

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. (Psalm 139:8)

That is not a promise about feeling Him. It is a statement about where He is, and the psalm goes on to name the darkness and say it makes no difference to Him at all.

You were accompanied through the flattest years of your life, and the accompanying did not depend on your noticing it, which is exactly what Psalm 139 claims about every place a person can go, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been there through all of it whether or not He was announced.

What Jacob did next, and what he did not do

Here is the part that makes this useful rather than merely comforting.

Jacob does not try to relive the night. He does not go back to sleep hoping for a second dream. He gets up, takes the stone he had under his head, sets it upright, and gives the place a name.

That is all. He marks it and he goes on walking, and he is still, by any honest reading, the same complicated man he was the day before.

The marking matters though. Because from that morning on, there was a name attached to a stretch of road he would otherwise have remembered only as the night he ran away.

You are allowed to keep walking as the same complicated person and mark the ground anyway, and Genesis 28 has him doing exactly that with a stone and no change of character, and it is the Spirit rather than a person's improvement that makes the marker true.

You have permission to go back and put a name on a stretch you already lived through, and the naming is not you inventing something (Genesis 28:16), and the same Spirit who was in the place is the one who makes a person able to say so afterward.

And there is a promise about this in Isaiah that is easy to read past, and it says the treasure is in the dark specifically.

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. (Isaiah 45:3)

Treasures of darkness. Not treasures instead of the darkness. Things that were in there, and are given afterward, and the stated purpose is that a person would know the name of the one who called them.