Personal crisis is often the occasion for deep spiritual experience. So it was for Jacob, running scared for his life to a foreign country. All his life he had lived on the borrowed faith of his father and grandfather. He was raised in their faith, even knew their faith, but never had a personal experience with the God of that faith. To Jacob, it was all second-hand reality. The amazing point is that God now speaks to Jacob at the moment of his desperation. Guilty about his past, fearful of the future, and uncertain in the present, Jacob will learn the lesson that there is no place we can go where God is not already there.