To my good niece

(Thoughts sparked by her questions and struggles)

Who are you? Freaking Job? Probably more than you know! The problem is, most of us don’t have the first idea of who Job really was. We hear “the patience of Job,” or “the faith of Job” and cast him-and-his-faithful-patience into the rising heap of our own failures. Thus, we never meet the real Job.

We remain strangers to this man who said: “I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (7:11); who cried out, “I am full of confusion” (10:15); this man who accused God of breaking him with a tempest and multiplying his wounds without cause (9:17) and of being cruel to him (30:21); this man who charged God with removing his hope like a tree [tearing it up by the roots?] (19:10); this man who, in the integrity of his soul, stood up to God and demanded to be judged in truth and justice (chp. 31). Job suffered immense despair (6:2-4) and terrifying dreams (7:14) and railed against his own birth (3:11). Why? Because the God he thought he knew, the God he had been acculturated to, the God his “friends” were defending with passionate certitude, was nothing like the God who was manifesting in his life.

And yet Job could not quite give up believing in an honorable God. He was horribly conflicted, cycling between railing at God’s seeming injustice and inexplicable silence, and believing that God loved him and was indeed honorable, just, and worthy of every trust (13:15). (Is there even the odd déjà vu here?)

It is troubling when teachers/leaders laud Job for his patience and testimony and ignore all the despair and sufferings in-between, for therein is our best affirmation and comfort—in Job’s ability, courage, and integrity to say what he really thought, felt, and experienced (27:5). Many latter-day testimonies and explanations of God’s purposes and character seem reminiscent of Job’s friends—some even quoting the words of those friends without realizing what God said of those very words and friends (42:7).

Maybe you already know the real Job. But if not, maybe you can find a comfort-brother in him. Most losses/traumas are not as extreme as his (or his wife’s), but the questions and psychic pain are just as real. I do not understand God’s answer to Job (beginning finally in Chp. 38), unless it is to reiterate that our mortal perspective may be less than a pinhole in the dark—with periodic flashes of understanding, comfort, and hope (that seem to fade again, all too quickly). God's answer seems to say, “You haven’t even grasp the lesser questions like where the rains come from etc. etc. and you’re wanting answer to the great question of why your life and this creation of mine is awash in tears—when I am a just and loving God?!” (I think you have it right, in part—agency is key, but as I read Job, his story goes beyond the tragedies within agency. It goes to the very heart of who God is and what He intends to convey in this story of suffering and confusion.)

Maybe God’s answer is also a little déjà vu your recent visit to the vet with Josser—like “there is no way this pain, fear, and confusion can make sense with his present capacity to understand.” (Or maybe it’s just the chaos/hazards of life? I don’t know.)

Job didn’t seem to get the answers he pled for, but it appears that he, at last, saw something (42:5) that made the difference: “Wherefore I will be quiet [at peace] for I am comforted that I am dust” (See other translations of 42:6, e.g. Stephen Mitchell’s Book of Job, p. 88). So I wonder, at core: Is the change you seek really a question of determining you are worth having good things happen to you? Maybe, in part, (again, I don’t know), but I look at Job, at the sorrows of nearly every striving person in the scriptures—at the Savior, himself—and it all seems more a matter of living in this fallen world and being tested to the max.

So, as I see it: 1) many who seek God will be like Job, cycling in conflicted agony, between relentless questions/struggles and deep belief (or desire to believe) until a sufficient answer/insight/ reconciliation comes; 2) God is not offended with sincere, honest confrontation and questioning (42:7), even though some of His friends and defenders may be. (Though He may do a little confronting and questioning of His own; e.g., Job 38-41); and 3) the adversary is obsessively attracted to every soul (in every degree of imperfection) who strives to overcome the natural man. Thus, some failures are a given; renewed strivings, a choice; repentance, a constant necessity; and the atonement our only hope (if only we could understand it!).

But how to endure? So far, for me, it has been those periodic flashes in the dark (sometimes found in the writings of others); and my attempts to say, “Thank you,” for the smallest of serendipitous mercies, graces, and reminders—even in the presence of pain and confusion and the absence of the greater gifts and blessings that I desperately seek and think I need (maybe even think I deserve!).

It is worth getting to know the real Job.

Trauma Happens

It happens to good people. It happens to not-so-good people. And when it does, it seems our human nature to cry, “Why me?” “Why this?” “Why now?” Or as a good niece of mine recently wrote, “I need some extra help in trying to remember that God doesn’t hate me.”

The short answer to the good and the not-so-good, alike, is that God loves His children. Yet doubts take wing in the wake of trauma, especially for those who are trying to do and to be good—doubts that must be as old as Adam and Eve. What must they have felt to lose two sons in a single day—the younger to murder by the elder, and that eldest, to a life of wandering and exile?

So why, in the witness of the ages—in the trauma stories and déjà vu of millions of souls—do traumatic events seem so irreconcilable to our expectations of life and God? And why is the second trauma—the ensuing, protracted mental and spiritual anguish—so consuming? Why must the mind relive, regurgitate, rehash, and endlessly re-envision all that could/should have been, if only …; All that might not have been, except for …?

Is it because we refuse the witness of the ages? The witness that trauma happens—somewhere, in every moment, in every social and economic class—even to good people. Maybe, especially to good people. Read Biblical Job, but be wary of his friends! God’s criticism of them (Job 42:7) seems but to reiterate the chasm between His ways and ours; His thoughts and ours (Isaiah 55:9).

Those of us who kick and bang at God’s door (this writer being a prime specimen) seem merely to exacerbate our trials and tribulations, because we insist on fashioning God in an image of our own expectation—an expectation where a loving God gives good things and protects from bad things (good and bad being from our point of view). Where trauma, suffering, and injustice cannot be good things. Where an all powerful, omniscient God would prevent trauma and tragedy, especially to His God-fearing children.

So back to the witness of life: It is that trauma happens. It has happened. It will continue to happen—even to good people. Even to God’s beloved prophets. Christ, Himself, said, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

So perhaps it is not the initial trauma that is the most traumatic. Perhaps it is the torturous disconnect between the God we want/expect/demand/ envision and the God we get. The God we get has witnessed in story upon story, event upon event that, in this world, trauma happens—to the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the rich, the poor. We don’t want to hear this. We don’t want to experience this. We don’t want the uncertainty of sacrificing the “good” life for His good will and finding His will not so good for our mortal expectations.

We don’t want the mind-numbing God-confusion that tortured Biblical Job (Job 10:15). We don’t want to give up the God we espouse for the God who manifests; for the God who is too often silent, or perhaps worse, who answers at last, as He did Job, with a list of mind-boggling questions (Job 38-41). And for those who espouse The Law of Attraction, one needs to ask: Why all these traumatic events in the lives of apostles and prophets, saints and sages, teachers and truth-seekers? (See left-hand column: “My World/TransWorld View: The First Law of Attraction.”)

Perhaps, it all comes down to this: A test of trust—whether WE can be trusted to choose God, truth, light, peace, justice, mercy, integrity, forgiveness, benevolence, virtue, faith, hope, charity, repentance, and so forth, out of pure intelligence, awareness, commitment, or endurance, when all around us there seems every reason—every justification, every passion and pressure—not to. And where, in this world of opposites, every deception abounds.

If we can be so trusted in the worst of times, maybe then, the light will dawn and we will come to know the full measure of our creation.