Genesis 28:10-19: Surely God was in this place

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. 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. 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. There above it stood the Lord, and he said: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 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.”

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. - Genesis 28:10-19

We have a calendar that consists entirely of pictures of piles of rocks of various shapes stacked on each other. The piles are called "cairns" and recently there has been a debate in national parks as to whether visitors should knock these over. In one park, there are so many created by visitors that the rangers have authorized their tumbling. But in another, rangers discourage the tearing down of cairns because int he wilderness, these cairns have been set up as landmarks mean to guide hikers back to the trailhead.

Jacob builds a cairn from the rock he was resting his head on after an uncomfortable night of sleep that had been filled with the most incredible, vivid dreams. "Surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it." 

For us, there is a place or a time when we become acutely aware of God's presence. Not that he wasn't already always there. We just weren't aware that he was there. 

Imagine that moment when you are just doodling on your paper when you suddenly realize that the person you like is in the room and watching you. That can be an exhilarating moment or a scary moment, depending on what you were doing and how you think they think about you. But the awareness of the presence of that person changes the entire atmosphere of the room. When the intersection of place and time are stamped into our brain, it becomes a monument. Like Jacob's rock pile in the desert. Like when I realized that my (then) girlfriend had said yes on a night bus to Manila. Seared into my brain. 

Jacob has been in trouble, has a transcendent dream of God and angels in heaven, and wakes from his sleep with the images still in his brain. That is why he says, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."

These landmarks--these cairns--are the way we navigate. Not by rules or maps but by the signposts of God's presence. We track these so we can say, "Surely God was in this place!"