Never Forsaken

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​I can’t say that I ever experienced real suffering before the age of 15. I’m sure, as a child, I believed I was suffering— when my brothers left me out of an activity, when I had to do chores, or I was wrongly reprimanded in class.
 
Overall, though, everything in my life was pretty good. That is, until suddenly it wasn’t.

When I was 15, my family fell apart and, with it, my general belief that God was good and He was for me. I was left with a lot of questions and not a lot of great advice, much like our friend, Job, in this week’s reading.
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In two short chapters we watch Job’s life fall apart— his family, his wealth, and his health. Job wrestled to reconcile God’s justice with his own personal suffering, because it’s clear he had done nothing wrong. We read in Job 1:8 that Job was “a man of perfect integrity, who [feared] God.” Job’s story challenges Western ideas that are basically “Christian karma”— that if we’re good, God will be good to us, and if we’re experiencing suffering it’s because of something wrong we did.
 
The mental anguish revealed in the subsequent dialogue is not grief over loss of Job’s possessions, rather grief over his perceived abandonment by God...
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