Back in my last year of seminary, I lived in an intentional Christian community with two other women. We prayed together daily and opened our house for a community meal once a week. During one of those community meals, a cat got into the house. A cat that we did notice until it was literally climbing the walls of our living room at 1am. It felt desperate, scared, and alone. Kind of like Job here in chapter 23. Job feels weighed down by what has happened to him and his family. Searching for God, demanding answers from God, feeling lost and abandoned by God. Job wishes he could disappear, vanish into thick darkness. And, just like that cat didn’t start out climbing walls, it took the past 20 chapters to get where we find Job today.
The past 20 chapters were filled with Job experiencing great pains and sorrow, spiraling into frantic depression, and some “friends” saying really unhealthy and unhelpful things to him.
After the loss of his livestock, his children, and his own health, Job cries out, regrets his birth and wishes he had never been born. To which his friend Eliphaz replies, “If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended? But who can keep from speaking?” and he goes on to say Job has clearly done something wrong to bring about all this disaster. Then his other friends say, your children got what they deserved, repent from whatever sinning you did to deserve this, and by the way you probably deserved worse and should have been punished more. I mean, with friends like those, who needs enemies? Job replies to them, “miserable comforters are you all. Have windy words no limit? What provokes you to keep on talking” and cries out, desperate to find God amidst the noise and pain.
My heart breaks for Job, what he has experienced, and what his friends have said to him. But Job also falls into their same pattern of windy words. Words that don’t help but increase anxiety, depression, and frustration. Between the friends and Job’s own, at times almost frantic, desperation, God doesn’t get a word in edgewise until chapter 38, that is 15 more chapters after this one.
The issue of this passage, isn’t that Job cries out to God. Sometimes life feels overwhelming. Sometimes life feels suffocating. Sometimes life just feels numb and it is ok to cry out to God. It is okay to share what we go through and feel. Naming our pain is powerful. Getting it out can allow us to address it and work through it. Expressing lament, frustration, or sorrow is a faithful response to what we experience in life AND sometimes we have to pause and cut through all the noise. The cat in our house, couldn’t recognize that Amber and I were trying to help it or that hope was literally within reach until it stopped running and climbing walls and paused. In Psalm 46 God isn’t sweetly singing soft kitty, as we often interpret it. No, in the Hebrew it is clear, God is shouting at us in the imperative with exclamation points, “BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD!” Sometimes, we have to be still and stop listening to the voices in our head and the voices all around us. Difficult, painful, and sorrowful things will happen in our life but they are not punishments from God. Sometimes we have to remember, or be reminded, that suffering does not mean God has abandoned us. Bad things happening, does not mean that God not longer loves us.
Isaiah 43 – Walk through fire not be burned, rivers will not consume you, you are my child, my beloved, and precious to me
Psalm 22 alternates deep heart cries with remembrances of God’s presence – “6 But I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock at me;
they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
…
9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
10 On you I was cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.”
John 16 – “”I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.””
In the midst of a world where friends don’t always give the healthiest advice, when our own brains can be mean and lie to us, and where bad things do happen to good people, there is good news. The good news that God’s ultimate nature is revealed in Christ whose name is Emmanuel which means God with us.
The good news that we are not alone in our suffering and that in fact, God has suffered too. One commentary on Job put it this way, “Job’s cry is answered by Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15: 34). For here, in the midst of Jesus’ anguished cry, we find that the depth of human suffering has been taken into God’s very being. God is very much aware of the realities of suffering, for God’s Son has himself suffered.”
It is ok to shout and cry.
It is ok to name your pain and sorrow.
But also take time to stop, be still, and breathe. Your sufferings and difficulties are not punishment or retribution. God never promises that life will be easy and always sunshine and roses but we do have the assurance that God is with us. Even in the darkest of times and the bleakest of moments, there is hope, there is love, there is God’s presence.