Daily Practice February 2, 2026 Issue

The good fight

Ethel A. Baker

It’s not uncommon to hear people talk of their struggles and battles. We tend to say, “I’m struggling with X,” as though we’re in a wrestling match with something that might possibly gain the upper hand.

The Hebrew Scriptures share quite a lot about Jacob, a man who faced one of the most noteworthy biblical struggles. Through cheating and lying to his family, he ended up estranged and living far away from them for twenty years. When God guided him to return to his family home—and his brother, whose wrath he had fled—Jacob struggled mightily with terror that his brother would exact revenge (see Genesis 32:24–30). But rather than fleeing or preparing for confrontation, the night before they were to meet, Jacob sought God’s direction and was humbly willing to follow it.

The Bible depicts this fight with fear, accompanied by a deep search for God’s guidance, symbolically as “a man” wrestling with Jacob “until the breaking of the day.” Previously, Jacob had fought with others, but the Christian Science textbook explains that he was now in a wholly mental battle, “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” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 308).

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Praying for the World

The beatific presence that moves the heart