It is a difficult thing not to be seen.

To wish for someone to look your way with recognition, affirmation, affection,

to thirst for that kind of love in a place where there is no water.

It might be the most difficult thing in the world.

This is a story about a blind father and a son stumbling through the desert.

It's a story about deception and the shaping wounds inflicted by

family and what it's like to run away. And it's a story about another father who sees, who visits us

in our heartache and our loneliness,

a god to whom, ironically, we are often blind.

I'm Justin Gerhardt.

Welcome to Holy Ghost Stories. Music I'm going to be. He's sweating under the goat skin.

His aged mother turns him one way and then another, tying knots, closing her eyes and reaching out to him and pantomime mimicking her husband, his father, trying to guess where he might touch this smooth-skinned son who is posing as his other son, the one with hair on his arms and shoulders,

the one born barely first, the one Isaac loves most.

He will not know, she assures her boy.

"'He is old. He's blind.

"'Not completely blind, mother.

"'If Jacob corrects her like this,

"'she responds, blind enough to love the wrong son.

"'There.'

"'She rubs her hands across his forearms, the backs of his hands, his neck,

goat hair covering his flesh. She nods, walks away, and returns a moment later with a bowl

of stew and a hunk of warm bread. It smells divine. Rebecca places the food in Jacob's hands

...