Jacobs Ladder Prayer

Father, Jacob slept on a stone and dreamed a stairway with angels going up and down, Genesis 28:12. He woke and said the Lord was in this place and he had not known it. That line catches me. He had not known it. He was a man on the run, sleeping rough, with no reason to expect a vision from heaven at a roadside campsite, and You were there the whole time. The dream did not put You there. It revealed You to him. The places I have passed through this week were also places where You were, and I did not always know it. Wake me to the ladder. The angels move between heaven and earth at the ordinary spots — the kitchen table, the office hallway, the parking lot at dusk. Surely the Lord is in this place too. Make me a person who notices the ladder instead of rolling over and going back to sleep. Amen.