Up and ahead

 

            Sometimes we are blindsided by a sudden shift in life. We thought we were on stable ground, and then someone starts shouting at us in a routine meeting, or tells us we don’t have a job anymore on a Monday morning, or a loved one leaves on Friday evening with no plans to return. We are left with broken piece of something that once made a kind of sense to us. We knew, and now we do not know.

            Where is God? We can’t see Him anymore. We cannot understand where He went to, or what he was thinking. We trusted Him, didn’t we? Now look where we are… It is the better part of wisdom to be quiet when these calamities come to visit and to wait. It is the one wise thing Job’s friend did, when first they saw the plight of the miserable man, they only wept with him.

            When later they decided to try and explain things, it did not help Job at all. What could they tell him? They didn’t have answers. And a lot of times we do not have answers either. We are too scared to have an answer clearly. If it happened to someone near us, it might happen to us. We try to explain away our own fears, reasoning the disaster further and further from ourselves. We leave our friend alone in their weeping, we do not want to be close to them and the potential disaster.

            In Job 38 God shows up and speaks while he has Job listen, not to an explanation, but to a series of questions that serve only to reveal God Himself. God Himself is the answer. We do not trust God because we understand. We do not understand everything because we trust in God. By trusting in God, we find we do not need to understand everything. We can leave everything in the only hands big enough to hold it all.

            God handled Job’s disaster. He handled the bigger disaster of sin and its eternal penalty on the Cross, making a promise that whoever believes in the God-Man who died on that cross will have a life that no one can unsettle for all eternity. So, the answer to calamity that unsettles us is to keep our eyes fixed up and ahead.  Sounds simple, because it is; but it is not easy.

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