The kitchen light at two in the morning. The car park outside the hospital, where you sat for twenty minutes because you could not make yourself walk back in. The washing that has been on the floor for eleven days. The room down the hall with the door kept shut.
Nobody would call those places holy. You did not feel holy in them. You felt tired and frightened, and you would not have said God was anywhere in the building.
Jacob had a night like that.
He was running. He had lied to his father and cheated his brother, and he left home in a hurry because staying was no longer safe. He walked until the light went. He stopped where he stopped because his legs gave out, and the place itself meant nothing to him.
"When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep." (Genesis 28:11)
Open country, and a stone under his head. A young man who had wrecked everything he touched, lying down in the dark with nobody left in the world who wanted him.
And then, while he slept, heaven opened over him.
"He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." (Genesis 28:12)
God stood over him and spoke to him kindly. "I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." (Genesis 28:15)
God said nothing about the lying, and he attached no conditions to any of it. Jacob had not prayed. He had not asked for a thing. He was asleep, and God came anyway.
He had done nothing to earn it and he was not even awake to see it.
When he woke, the sun was up and the field looked exactly as it had the night before. The same dry ground. The same stone. And Jacob said the sentence that a lot of people end up saying about their worst years.
"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it." (Genesis 28:16)
He had slept the whole night in the house of God and felt nothing. No warmth came over him while it was happening, and he woke with no comfort he could have described to anyone. He lay down believing he was alone. He was wrong, and he had no way at all of knowing he was wrong.
"This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." (Genesis 28:17)
Ordinary ground, holy the whole time he was lying on it.
God did not wait for Jacob to be sorry. He did not wait for him to become someone easier to love. He came down to a man at his lowest, and he did it quietly, in the middle of the night, where nobody would see it and Jacob himself would sleep straight through it.
The season you remember as the emptiest one may turn out to have been the season you were least alone.
The bathroom floor. The hospital corridor. The messy home. The empty beds. God did not leave those places. You could not feel him there, and what you felt was honest, and it was still a poor guide to where he actually was.
You could not feel Him. He was there.
You will not get that knowledge in advance. Jacob did not. His morning came quickly, and some of us wait years for ours, but it comes. One day you will go back over that stretch of your life, the part you can hardly bear to look at, and something in it will have changed. You will see how you kept going with nothing left to keep going on. You will see who turned up, and how ordinary they looked at the time. And you are still here, which is not a small thing, and you will not be able to account for it by your own strength.
That was the stairway, standing over ground you thought was empty. You were held there long before you could know it, and the knowing does come.
