Jacob has been in Haran for twenty years. Twenty years away from the land of promise, from his parents, from Bethel where he saw the ladder and heard the voice of God. He arrived with nothing but a stone for a pillow. He leaves with two wives, two concubines, eleven sons, a daughter, and flocks so vast they stretch to the horizon.

God has been faithful in a foreign land. But a foreign land is still a foreign land. And there comes a moment when faithful provision in the wrong place becomes a reason to finally leave for the right one.

God can bless you in the in-between place. But blessing in the wrong season is not the same as being where He ultimately wants you. Do not mistake His grace in a temporary place for permission to make it permanent.

Chapter 30 is the complicated domestic life of Jacob’s household two sisters married to the same man, competing for his attention and affection, each one measuring her worth by the children she has borne. Leah has sons. Rachel has none. Rachel is desperate. She gives Jacob her servant Bilhah. Leah, whose womb has temporarily closed, gives Jacob her servant Zilpah. Children are born and named in acts of proclamation each name a declaration of hope or victory or vindication.

It is messy. It is painful. It is very human. And God is present in all of it.

God has never required a tidy household before He works in a family. He works in the complicated ones. He works in yours.

And then Rachel conceives. After all the waiting, after all the watching her sister bear child after child, after all the grief of barrenness God remembered Rachel. The same phrase used of Noah in the flood, the same phrase that will be used of Hannah before Samuel is born. God remembered. As if to say: she was never not on His mind. The waiting was not forgetting.

The thing you have been waiting for that feels like God has forgotten He has not forgotten. He is remembering you. The gap between the promise and the fulfilment is not silence. It is preparation.

Jacob then makes his deal with Laban over the flocks keep the speckled and spotted for himself, leave the plain ones to Laban. And God prospers Jacob in ways that go beyond Jacob’s own breeding schemes. An angel later tells Jacob in a dream: I have seen what Laban has done to you. It was not the streaked branches by the watering troughs that multiplied Jacob’s flocks. It was God, working in the biology of sheep and goats to fulfil a promise made twenty years earlier on a stone pillow in Bethel.

God can use your strategy, your creativity, your resourcefulness. But the results are His doing, not yours.

Chapter 31 opens with a change in atmosphere. Laban’s face is not what it was toward Jacob. His sons are bitter. And God speaks:

“Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred,

and I will be with you.”

— Genesis 31:3