Whether you think the popular story of Job in the Torah and in the Bible is a piece of literature or a historical fact, I think there are a lot of takeaways that continue to be valuable in modern times.
Every one of Job’s friends thought he was a goner when it came to his character. All they had ever witnessed was what an upright man he was, yet they categorically agreed that he must have done something really terrible to earn his suffering. Every friend that Job had ever had a connection with, that he had shared his heart with, that he had helped when they were down – they all united in their limited understanding of good and evil as well as their limited understanding of their friend Job to add even more misery to Job’s already full experience of misery.
To Job’s credit, he stood. With every painful ache of his being, he stood for what he was indeed sure of. He knew who he was and what he stood for. Job knew that God is good, that he had been obedient to God yet did not remotely compare to God’s goodness, and Job recognized that just because he did not understand something did not mean he had to force a circumstance to fit his understanding. He had an exceptional balance of holding loosely when the time was right and never letting go when the time was right.
Furthermore, the book of Job references a number of events that also occurred during the story but that were not shared in detail. For instance, Job has the same wife throughout the entire story. The woman that is so quickly condemned in Bible study for her lack of faith in God when she advises Job to curse God and die turns out to be the same woman who God allows Job to keep in his life, who is not known to have joined the prideful and spiritually out of touch friends who condemn Job, and who Job goes on to have a lot more hot date nights with that create an entirely new era of children.
Maybe she just loved her man and couldn’t stand to see him suffer and so she made a very shortsighted suggestion in a desperate attempt to see Job happy again instead of in agony. How many times do we miss such details in our own lives? Overwhelmed by a few particularly demanding events that we think will only take a brief period of time and then we will get back to our heart’s other priorities but that then end up defining a longer portion of our life than we ever imagined, we lose the less immediate yet still incredibly important special relationships that are dear to us.
Like Job, many of us have circumstances that continually ask a lot of us. But also like Job, we can be determined to never lose sight of our own character qualities and the character qualities of those we love. You’ve got this!
—
Shutterstock image