The Book of Job
Job 35:14 “Although you say you do not see Him, yet justice is before Him, and you must
wait for Him.”
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| Like flowers on a Cactus, beauty sometimes appears in moments of adversity |
As I
flip through a Gideon’s Bible in a hotel I gravitate to the book of Job. Over the course of the last five months I have
revisited the story of Job from the bible.
Re-reading the book and searching for a passage to succinctly describe the
recent state of perpetual predicaments my husband and I have endured, I realize
that the book of Job is, for a large part, a theological dialogue. The bible is
filled with stories of righteous men and women tested in their faith including Abraham’s
near-sacrifice of Isaac to Jesus’s time in the desert. However, the book of Job takes the story of a
man tested in his faith and drags it out through chapter after chapter of Job
and his companions discussing God’s judgment.
Jokingly I have told my husband “we
have proven that we will stand by each other in worse, for poorer, and in
sickness, perhaps it’s time we have proven our love for better, for richer, and
in health.” In January my husband was
hospitalized with H1N1 and while he was hospitalized they discovered he was
diabetic. At the beginning of April my
husband lost his job for excessive absences from his time in the hospital. Along this road we have had between us one flat
tire and one cracked windshield. Then in
early May our apartment was flooded with sewage when a construction crew pushed
rocks and debris down an open manhole which obstructed the sewage system. I think back to a scene from the Simpsons in
which Ned Flanders had a turn of misfortune:
Reverend Lovejoy: Well, aren't you being a tad melodramatic, Ned? Also, I believe Job was right-handed.
When good health, steady
employment, and a place to call home are ephemeral we feel the urgency to have
God lighten our burdens. While this year
has been difficult, sifting through sewage-soiled items difficult, I must
remind myself of the example of those who have carried heavier burdens with
more grace than I. When my husband was
in the hospital and I was weary from worry and the work there was to be done
(and soon to get sick with H1N1 myself), there was a poster in the hospital
that read “With God things are Possible, not Easy.”
With
the challenges that have been laid at my feet this past year, I do not blame
God. God is not malicious or cruel, he
does not bring down misfortune upon we unsuspecting mortals. I believe suffering to be an inherit part of
life. As long as humanity is unkind to
one another, as long as humanity is selfish, there will be suffering. The difficult part of my journey has been
finding the patience and the strength to proceed onward through my time of
trials to await better days.
We must
wait for God and that is the challenging part.
God answers all prayers, though sometimes the answer is “not yet” or
even “no”. We pray for jobs and do not
get them, but God has a different path planned for us, a vocation he has
readied for us. Our hearts are broken by
lovers, but it is because we are intended for someone else, someone who will
make us a better person and bring us greater love and happiness than we knew
before. So what do we do as we wait for
him? We continue, and we pray that God
grants us the wisdom to know when the time is right, and when the time is
not. We also pray that like Job before
us, when God has stripped us of certain blessings that new blessings will come,
when God’s plan is revealed.
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