Joy, freedom, energy, peace —one day during my senior year in college, all these things seemed to be taken from me. I was leaving the gym after an indoor baseball practice and slipped on a patch of ice, falling hard on the stone steps leading down to the street. I was stunned and unable to get up.

Immediately, a story in the Bible about Jacob wrestling came to mind. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy describes it this way: “Jacob was alone, wrestling with error,—struggling with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence as existent in matter with its false pleasures and pains,—when an angel, a message from Truth and Love, appeared to him and smote the sinew, or strength, of his error, till he saw its unreality; and Truth, being thereby understood, gave him spiritual strength in this Peniel of divine Science” (p. 308).

In the moments that followed, I felt a bit like Jacob­ might have—struggling with a disturbing situation but having a hopeful glimpse of divine Love’s promise of reality as spiritual. In order to more tangibly realize this angel message, I needed to turn to God and listen.