Job And Other Jobs

…you ever notice how when someone draws people from the Bible he always draws those people to look like himself?  And by “look like himself” I mean “be whatever color/ethnicity he is”?

Take Jesus, for example.  Sometimes he’s black, like in this Kenyan mural:

Sometimes he’s from the Far East, like in this other painting I found on Google:

This Jesus, the white man one, is pretty common:

I even found a monkey Jesus.  Look:

I don’t rightly know what to say about any of this, but today I’ll be talking about Job, and I cast my blog posts the way an elementary school casts a play; the kid who gives the best audition gets the role.  If the boy from Sri Lanka gives the best line reading at the audition, he gets to be Abraham Lincoln in the school production of Lincoln: Log Cabin Lawyer.

For this blog post, this guy had the best audition:

So he gets to be Job.

Now Job was a good man, a righteous man.  It says so right at the beginning of the story.

And, right towards the beginning, he loses everything.

His nice things.

His people.

 His health.

Gone.  Just like that.

What does he do?

No, Job takes a seat in an ash pile, scrapes himself with shards of pottery, and sits there while his wife screams at him…

…and his friends tell him he’s a bad person…

There’s a lot to learn from Job.  Here’s a good man who suffers a great deal and, although he desperately asks, he is never given a satisfactory answer to his question of why.

It’s a real tragedy, and it seems to me to be the kind of tragedy that happens all the time.  Seems to me that a lot of people go through the same kind of loss as Job, and for most people it happens before they even step out into the world.

I don’t know that you can call a baby righteous, but most of the babies with which I’ve been acquainted haven’t done anything that a reasonable person would call evil.  Yet there they are, in great number, born into terribly broken situations.

No nice things.

No people.

Nothing healthy.

They ask the same question Job asked, the question of why, long before they ever get to be Job’s age.

And they’ve lost everything before they ever had anything.

And the people around them look at them and say the same kinds of things Job’s friends said to him.

In Job’s story, God was displeased with Job’s friends.  I can’t imagine He’s any more pleased with people who say the same kinds of things today.

Maybe, if all you have to say is the same kind of thing Job’s friends had to say, maybe the best thing is for you to be quiet.  And listen.

Maybe hand the guy a bottle of water or something, I don’t know.

Or if you don’t have time to hand somebody a bottle of water, just stick with the Be Quiet And Listen part.  That’s what they all did when they first sat down with Job and God didn’t seem to have any problem with it.

Just don’t be the one standing there jabbering about things you don’t understand when that whirlwind shows up to set everything back in its right place.

Cheers.