reflections on job: part 3 {asking questions & making a case}

Why is life given to a man

whose way is hidden,

whom God has hedged in?

For sighing comes to me instead of food;

my groans pour out like water.

What I feared has come upon me;

what I dreaded has happened to me.

I have no peace, no quietness;

I have no rest, but only turmoil.

Job 3:23-26

This is at the end of Job's first speech since the onslaught of his pain and loss. His friends have come to be with him and seeing how much he is suffering, sit with him on the ground in silence for seven days (2:13). Just sitting. Just being present with him. Seven whole days and nights (and we all know that when you're in the thick of it, the nights are the hardest).

These first words out of his mouth are heavy with sadness: he laments the day he was born, wondering why he did not perish at birth (3:11), or why he is given life when his days are so bitter (3:20-21). There is no rest, nor is there any escape for him in his waking or living hours; death seems to be the only way out.

His friends, being the good Jewish boys they are, seek to explain to Job his pain. A very simplistic way of summarizing their theology is that if you're good and obedient, God blesses you. If you offend God, he curses you. They tell Job that God is disciplining him and that he should evaluate himself closely and confess his sin to God, do his best to make amends and live a righteous life. Job maintains before his friends that he has not offended God, that he has not exacted any injustice. In fact, Job desires to "speak to the Almighty / and to argue my case with God" (13:3).

From chapters 3 through 31, Job and his friends go round and round with arguments and answers to arguments. Job maintains his integrity and his friends try to convince him that his suffering is God's chastisement for him. When Elihu shows up in chapter 32, he tries to put both Job and his friends in their places: his friends are unable to answer Job's arguments or prove him wrong. To Job, he says that God does no wrong or evil toward any man (34:10), but "those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; / he speaks to them in their affliction" (36:15).

If I were Job, I'd be asking: How? How is he delivering me in this suffering? From what is He delivering me? How is He speaking? God has not said a thing.

I'm struck by the fact that in this span of more than thirty chapters (and who knows how many days and nights), God is alarmingly silent. While the pain continues and while his friends argue and while Job wonders and asks and maintains his integrity, God is quiet. The suffering continues, and Job wants to make his case before God, who does not answer him. At least not yet.

This song is one that has stayed with me since I first heard it about ten years ago. There is some comfort in knowing that Christ did not spare himself from any aspect of our human lives, including suffering; in His last moments He knew what it was to feel like God had disappeared, extricated Himself from the scene completely. But even in light of this, the questions continue and we wonder why, and when it will stop. Job asked, and I think no matter what kind of suffering we face, his questions are representative of those we ask when we are hedged in, when the pain just won't stop.

Please, God. Please. Answer me.

This song has no answers. But I love that in it, the questions I'm sometimes too afraid to ask are said out loud. There's a certain not-aloneness in that, and an inherent permission to feel the same.

NOTE: For some reason, the music doesn't want to embed in the post. I've put the song over on the sidebar.


Rich Mullins
"Hard to Get"

silence

I've had this CD for years, and historically it has not received much playtime. I've taken listening to Jars of Clay's Eleventh Hour album nearly every day. Each track contains something precious, and has resonated with me deeply in different ways over the last several weeks.

The CD was already in my car this morning when I started it and was on the sixth track, "Silence". It's not one I've paid much attention to until this morning. But as I find myself stripped, deeply exhausted, feeling quiet and defeated (we can be really honest here, right??), as I find myself in tears many times in the course of a day, this song gave words where I had none. It gave me permission to ask the question: where are You?

Though I know I can trust God is in this and hasn't gone away, my heart is sore and tired and just wants Him to be done with whatever He's doing.

I'm someone who believes the meaning of a song is inextricably tied to the music, so I'm posting both a video with the song and the lyrics.

Close your eyes and listen. Maybe it will speak to something in you, too.

Take
Take till there's nothing
Nothing to turn to
Nothing when you get through
Won't you break
Scattered pieces of all I've been
Bowing to all I've been
Running to
Where are you?
Where are you?

Did you leave me unbreakable?
You leave me frozen?
I've never felt so cold
I thought you were silent
And I thought you left me
For the wreckage and the waste
On an empty beach of faith
Was it true?

Cuz I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?

Scream
Deeper I wanna scream
I want you to hear me
I want you to find me
Cuz I ... I want to believe
But all I pray is wrong
And all I claim is gone

And I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?
Yeah....yeah
And where ... I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?

a song for the weary traveler

Many of us are in a place these days where we walk a dark, mysterious road. We know God brought us there, we know He's with us there. But we don't want to be there because it's dark and we're not the ones directing our own paths.

God is raising things to the surface in me that I really don't want to confront. It's going to hurt, it's going to require releasing some things I've wrapped myself around tightly for the last several years.

It's easy to want to shake my fist at Him, to envy Him in His heaven, fancying Him far removed from this all-too-real and painful path.

And then I remember ... He gets it. He's been there too. He's shared in our earthly existence, He's felt what it feels like to be us. He's felt what it's like to want another, less painful way only to find that the path of obedience is a painful and sacrificing one.

This song is one of the last ever recorded by Rich Mullins; Rich was killed in a car accident in September 1997 shortly after this crummy cassette-tape recording was made. But I prefer this version over the studio version by his band; there's something so raw and imperfect about it; unpolished and real. Kind of like me; kind of like all of us.

Something that reminds me ... He gets it.

See the lyrics to "Hard to Get" here.

stuck in my head

This is one of the first songs I remember singing after returning to my home church and has long been a favorite of mine. I can't stop singing it around the house this week ...