DAY 176

REGRET

Job 3 & 4

Regret, we often fall into it, especially when our world piles up on us. If you had lost your children, your home, your livelihood and your health, might you suffer some regret? Chapter three takes us deeply into Job’s emotions…let all be darkness. And then begins the all too frequent question we all ask “Why?” Receiving no answer he concludes that he is not at rest or ease.

Enter “Friend #1” – Eliphaz and he has been listening to Job’s regret, Job’s complaint you might say. Eliphaz is not the kind of friend who sympathizes with Job, he is more interested in helping Job answer the “Why” question. Eliphaz begins laying out his answer. He starts first by showing respect to Job, how many in the past have come to Job with troubles and so Eliphaz now asks if Job will bear with him as he, Eliphaz, provides insight. And it is not just human insight, no it comes from a dream and from a word, “Can mortal man be in the right before God?” There is Eliphaz’s theory. He will unpack it more in the next chapter, but it stands before us right now…the theory that Job is being punished by God for a wrong he has done.

Don’t lose this theory, it will operate throughout the Book of Job and it operates all too often in our lives. Some of us have small voices in the back of our minds. Sometimes those voices are filling our thoughts with regret, and other times they are making us ask ourselves if God is punishing us. The next few days will take us into the issue of suffering and all the questions that attend that all too often human experience.

Today, and for the next several, there is no “neat bow” that I can put around the blog entry…no closure I can give it...that is the reality of suffering. My blog posting in fact is a bit late today because yesterday I drove to be with my mother. She has had a stroke, a fairly severe one. As I entered where she was staying I entered a fairly nice facility, but it didn’t matter, people were there and they are suffering…there is no “nice bow” you can put around it. To be there was to be in the midst of a situation that is troubling, and a situation you cannot “fix.”

Job’s situation is like that, he cannot “fix it.” I like to fix things, especially when it involves people and places I care about. That desire is not a bad one, however we also must learn how “to be” in the presence of suffering and all the questions the suffering brings with it…and those questions will ultimately bring us to questions about God. This is where we will spend the next few days, not a fun read, but an important one.