You can hope with me this will be my last Job email. I really cannot help
myself. I’ve only read 10 chapters and I feel my world flipping upside down, my brain exploding with all kinds of thoughts.
When you get to chapter 2 in the story, you meet three of Job’s friends. You really think you’re about to enter into this sweet encounter when you read about how they all got together and decided to visit poor Job. At this point, Job has lost his children, he has these awful sores all over his whole body, and his wife has said to him (no lie or
exaggeration):
Curse God and die. Gosh, I’m sure that lady was a real bucket of fun in marriage.
So the three friends show Job comfort and sympathy while he’s at rock-bottom. They do a few things right: they show up for Job during his suffering. They mourn and sit with him. They’re present and this matters. This cannot be discounted.
However, it isn’t long before each of Job’s friends begin laying into him about what he has likely done wrong and what he
needs to do in order to relieve the suffering he’s experiencing. They come at him like self-help gurus, as if they know his trials better than he does.
This is a blaring warning sign for all of us:
we cannot play God or assume we have all the answers for someone in the time of suffering. That’s not our job. That’s not our role.I can tell you from experience that it is incredibly hard to sit with someone in the waiting. It is hard to sit with
someone when things don’t make sense or when the darkness seems endless. I’ve done it all wrong at certain points in my life. I’ve been the girl who thinks everything can be solved with a few good goals and a massive checklist. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve tried to talk away the darkness with my own stories. It really wasn’t until I walked through some impossible darkness myself that I realized human words fail all the time and people—though we get to be many beautiful things in this
lifetime— were never designed to be lifeboats...
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