reflections on job: part 1 {the measure of suffering}

About a week ago, I read the book of Job in one sitting: the entire book, from start to finish. I've never read it that way prior to that day and now I'm convinced that it's a narrative that needs and begs to be read as such. Perhaps it's because I had eyes to see it and because I had the time to absorb it all in one sitting, but now I see things there that I've missed before.

I am always reluctant to draw any comparisons between myself and Job. It's a tough act to follow, isn't it? The man loses all his material wealth, property, his family, and his servants in a matter of sentences and barely a breath later, is afflicted from boils and sores from head to toe. His life is utterly devastated within the first two of forty-two chapters. And yet he famously praises God in the midst of his profound losses (The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised, 1:20). When his wife tells him to curse God and die, Job holds fast and replies, Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble? (2:10). All this while scraping sores from his body with a piece of broken pottery.

Lord, have mercy.

Anything I relegate to the category of "suffering" in my life hardly measures up to what this man experienced in such a short amount of time. But maybe that's where I need to stop myself: the minute I start quantifying suffering and deem my experience smaller or less significant, I cut off a pathway by which the wisdom offered in those forty-two chapters might gain admittance to my heart. I risk missing the point entirely. I may put a roadblock on the path by which I might gain to insight or find a specific and fitting grace for my soul.

Suffering cannot be quantified or compared; I cannot measure with any objectivity the loss and grief I experience against that of another -- even Job. When I try to measure suffering, I make it less than it is. And we all know that when you're in the thick of it, weighted down by worries and grief and darkness and loss and impossible questions, there is no bottom to the grief. You can never find the end of it.

Perhaps it's a tool of the enemy to have us thinking that our suffering is worthless, or that we are simply too weak and that is why it's so hard for us. We're really not all that righteous, are we? Aren't we just getting what we deserve? If God really loved us, He would have stopped any of this from happening.

And so on, and so on.

Truth is, regardless of how much I'm going through or how bad it is, I'm asking some of the same questions Job did. Offering some of the same defenses. Wondering what God is up to when it seems like the losses are compounding and will never end. Hurting like crazy and finding no salve in sight. Wondering if this is my life forever, if this is what the faithful can expect from a loving God. Sitting in the ashes, picking at my wounds with broken things.

So I ignored the enemy's voice, and I opened the book of Job.