my man Job

aka "El Trabajo"...just kidding.  (Spanish joke there. Jajajaja.)

"Job feared God and shunned evil."  (Job 1:1)
Then all his kids got killed, his stuff got taken away, his wife peaced out and he got a bunch of boils. Sick. (my own paraphrase)

"Amazingly, Job neither sinned nor blamed God.  He responded beautifully; he worshiped...What makes this story so bewildering is the undeserved nature of his suffering.  Job was innocent.  There was no connection between his sin and the amount of pain he experienced. This seems terribly unfair."  (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, p. 138)

I get why God put this story in the Bible and why it was one of the first recorded (I think the Reverend Clark told me that at one point?)  I don't pretend to be as holy as Job.  But I get what it means to feel like God just HASN'T LET UP for the past 6 years with hard things.  And as much as I ask and as much sin as I know we still have to work through, these things aren't happening because of that.  He's been really clear about that.

And I think it's easy for us to skip to the end of Job's story after his friends give him a bunch of crappy advice and try to find faults in Job in order to make sense out of the mystery that is Job's life.  We skip to the part of the story where he gets way more blessed than he ever was before a la Bill Gates plus some and has a bunch of hot daughters called Job's daughters.

But don't tell me that before all that it didn't just really suck.  So that's where I'm sitting.  The on-going pain of long-term struggles.  The asking why.  Wanting to get comfort out of God when it feels like He's the one doing the hurting.  And this blog title came about with the analogy that I want to live life out on the branch, in faith.  And here I am, months later, and it feels like He just went and dropped me out of the branch.  He didn't but it feels like it.  Learning how to live with where God has you and the MYSTERY that is God.  Why He does the things He does and knowing I might not get to find that out.  So when I think about that and then the fact that Job worshiped as his first response to his pain, I am humbled.  And bewildered.

Easily my most uplifting post so far.