Wrestling with God

Lately God has been beginning to solidify a lot of the character building He has been doing in me for the past two years. & this past month, God has been really nudging my heart & challenging me through a series of events:
"Ok Eileen. I've been teaching you how to be more like Me for two whole years. You know it in your mind & you want it in your heart. Now it's time to actually live it out." 

To be honest, I thought after all this time of breaking me, molding me, & teaching me, it would be easy for me surrender my own desires & to follow His. What was there to hesitate about? But the more God began to test me, the more I began to wrestle. 
Why can't my desires be the same as yours? 
Why do I have to feel like I'm forcing myself when I choose to obey?
Is this even what you want, God?
I don't know if I have hope in my career anymore. I don't understand why I can't date & I have to think about marriage at such a young age. I don't know if I can trust myself with committing to ministry for another whole year right now. 

& then God told me to read about Jacob wrestling with the Lord. 
Jacob was always conversing with the Father. He desired to see God's promises manifest in his own life. He heard God & he fought to obey, & he loved God with his whole heart.
But at the same time, Jacob wrestled. Jacob struggled. & Jacob made mistakes. 
Rereading the passage, I realized that Jacob wasn't wrestling with God out of disagreement or out of an unwillingness to live the way God wanted him to. Jacob wrestled because he wanted to live the way God wanted him to, & he was fighting to get there. 
Jacob lived his whole life striving to fulfill God's promises through deceit & through his own idea of what was right. But by approaching Jacob in his most vulnerable state & allowing him to fight with God face to face, God was teaching him what living God's way actually looked like. 
When God tells Jacob, "You have prevailed" (Genesis 32:28), He wasn't saying Jacob was stronger than He was. He was honoring the fact that Jacob cared enough about God's way to wrestle with Him all night long. The point was that Jacob ​pressed in. Jacob didn't give up halfway because he was tired. Jacob persevered. 

Jacob was alone in the forest before wrestling with God because he began to live life on his own. He forgot to ask God what God wanted him do, & instead cultivated a fear of Esau in his own heart. The "what if's" of What if Esau is still angry? What if Esau is not willing to forgive me? What if Esau kills my family? leads him to a place of weariness. Because with trust comes peace, & with doubt comes hopelessness. 
BUT, 
Jacob holds on tight for many hours to ask of God one thing- "God, won't you bless me." 
Yet God's definition of "blessing Jacob" wasn't ridding Jacob of his fear of Esau, or rescuing him from the hands of his brother, or blessing him with materialistic things (which to me, seem most reasonable). Instead, God's very best idea was giving Jacob a new name.
Imagine if you asked God to bless you, & you wake up the next morning with the name "Jane" instead of "Emily" on your driver's license. Uh, what? That's not what I asked for. & that's definitely not gonna change my circumstances. 
But God's greatest blessing He chose to offer Jacob was giving him something that would equip him to step into an entirely new realm of his destiny. A greater level, if I may say, of destiny that he didn't have access to before. Because he was born a deceiver. Because he was born with the limitations of his sin. But the name "Israel" (meaning: "he has prevailed with God) was God's way of saying,
"You have fought to live my way, so my promises will now be manifested into your life from this moment on." 

Jacob entered the forest in a place of fear & doubt, but left with breakthrough. & the very thing that allowed a shift in Jacob's destiny was Jacob's willingness to wrestle with God Himself with the very things that seem hardest to address. 

I strongly believe that one can only wrestle with God if they have the friendship & relationship with Him to be able to go to Him & say,
"God, I know you want me to live in this way, but I can't seem to fully surrender myself to that, so would you equip me (whatever that may look like- even if it's different from my expectations) in a way where my name, my very identity, every inch of my bones is in perfect tune with your plans for me." 

So I'm wrestling. 
I have to fight with every bit of my strength & willpower to choose to live the way that God told me to. & I feel him testing me down to my core & deep in my bones, but I am hopeful in this season because I know it's an opening into a new realm of destiny. Because I know that when I CHOOSE to live the way God calls, instead of doing so only when it's most comfortable for me, God will bless me- His way, not my way. & that's the greatest form of blessing that I can ever ask for.