UNTIL TODAY, I don’t think I’ve ever shed a tear while reading a Bible commentary.
I’m 38 pages into David J.A. Clines’s 501-page commentary on the first 20 chapters of Job. That’s when Job reacts to the news he lost his livestock, servants, and all 10 of his children and their families. He lost them to raiders, a windstorm, and lightning that set his pastures on fire.
Complaining to a friend
A year ago I was complaining about my troubles to a friend I’ve known since we were kids. She’s a Presbyterian minister now. She wrote,
“Steve, I do know it is so hard to watch people suffer and for you… this loss after loss after loss. I’m very sorry. You do find ways to make something meaningful and beautiful out of the hard things — that’s what you’re writing does.”
I wrote her back, “I’m sure the son will rise again. But it’s dark at the moment.”
The son rose today, between the pages of a book.
I felt the warmth on my face and then the glide down my cheeks.
Misery’s short course
I’ve lost a lot lately.
Family dead or dying.
Dogs dead or dying.
Good friends gone to the insane and vindictive hatred of some politicians.
Worst day of my life
The worst for me was putting down our dog Buddy two years ago now. I’ve been angry with God that long. And soon, I fear, we’ll have to do the same for Maizey, our puppyish six-year-old Black Lab with lymphoma. Chemo is keeping her here for the moment. But 50 percent of dogs on chemo for this don’t last a year. Maizey was diagnosed the Saturday after Christmas.
Heck, I can’t even type this without pausing a while.
What Job said didn’t make sense
Messengers, one after another, delivered Job’s bad news:
- 13,500 head of livestock taken by raiders
- All the slaves that cared for them, slaughtered
- 10 grown kids and their families crushed when wind collapsed the house
His wife and his life was all he had left. She told him to curse God and die.
To which he said:
“I came here with nothing, and I’ll leave with nothing. The LORD gave them to me and the LORD took them away. Praise the LORD and thank him for who he is” (Job 1:21, Casual English Bible).
What drew the tears?
I’ll paraphrase the scholar’s comments about that because that’s what I do, turn the passive academic writing style into more readable active sentences:
“Job didn’t praise God for giving or for taking. He praised God for who he is to Job—for what he means to Job.”
It works like this…and that’s what hit me with force: If we praise God for only the good things, we might as well damn him out loud for the bad because that’s what we’re doing in silence.
Job recognized nothing belongs to him. It all belongs to God. Job saw the balance between the happy and the sad of life. Granted, he got angry later and ripped into God but good. He was human, even if only as some say, a fictional character teaching a lesson like a long parable.
Yet his gut reaction was a godly reaction. He’d get mad later, but he would come back to who he was at first and who he was to the core: a man grateful to God.
A picture of Buddy on the wall
I have a picture of Buddy hanging on my wall at the bottom of the stairs. I pass him when I come or go to my office or my bedroom. It’s a beautiful picture I took in the backyard. But it has made me sad these past two years.
He was my dog, I thought. My joy. My friend. My comforter. He could sense my spirit and park beside me when no one else knew what was going on because I wasn’t talking.
I was wrong. He was not my dog. He was my gift, a bleeding dog my wife found at the side of the road on her way to work as a hospital nurse. We had him for nearly a decade.
Here’s what Job and the scholar are teaching me to do:
To walk by the picture of Buddy and think of those wonderful years instead of that wrenching moment. That’s the moment I told the vet “Okay” and watched the lights go out in the beautiful brown eyes looking at me with fear and hope and trust.
The prayer
“God take that moment. The worst of my life, when I killed the sweetest soul I’ve ever known. You can have it. I’ll keep the years.”
It’s time to reset. To remember who I am, who Buddy was, and who Maizey is. We don’t belong to each other. We just love each other while we can.
I’m grateful for that. And I’m trying to be more grateful to God than angry. A decade weighs more than a moment, however painfully heavy that moment was. And God knows it was.
If we’re lucky, we’ll have had Maizey for three years if she lives the Chemo Year. We saved her the morning she was to be put down for anxiety issues. The first words I spoke to her when she came into our house, a couple hours after she should have been gone:
“Maizey, you’re alive.”
I used to tell her that a lot. I can’t do it anymore. For I know what hurts to know.
But I know, too, that if it’s my call, she won’t leave until she needs to leave. And when she’s gone, we will have had these wonderful years with her. Not enough. But we’ll make do.
Can I do this thing?
I don’t know if I can pull this off, letting go of the pain and embracing the gifts of God whether given or taken.
Who would have thought a 500-page commentary on the first 20 chapters of Job could do this to me?
I just placed my order for the remaining commentaries in the series: Job 21-37 and Job 38-42.
Peace to you. And peace to me.
Steve
Leave a Reply