Job was a righteous man doing all the right things with all the right attitudes, yet within a relatively few short days, his world came crashing down around him.  He ended up with nothing and even the human support that he needed became a torment for him.  My son once told me that when writing a fictional story, the secret of creating an interesting plot is to persistently throw bad stuff at your hero, so he or she has to keep overcoming problems.  In other words, authors basically torture their main characters.  I guess pain creates good literature, but it makes for a terrible life.  Like my son’s fictional characters, the real man, Job, went from a charmed life to being overwhelmed by “rotten luck.”  Of course, the Bible pulls back the curtains of the drama to show us that there was much more going on behind the scenes than Job or any of the other characters of the book had ever dreamt of.

Unfortunately, the horrific events that Job experienced are not restricted to the pages of a book.  Those events are the reality that we live in.  Most of us have experienced the heart-wrenching descent from a charmed period of our existence into dark pits of stress and even despair.  Even worse, some of us have never had the good fortune to experience the charmed part of life and have only ever dwelt with oppression and pain.  A Bible study lesson book that I have recently been studying calls these experiences “crucibles.”  There are a lot of brilliant lessons that we can learn from our crucible experiences, and those lessons are valuable to us in our Christian walk, but somehow, those lessons do not have much meaning when life has left you broken and bleeding and scorned and alone.  The raw pain that wrings tears from your eyes and screams from your heart does not allow for much else to enter into your psyche at that moment, so what do you do?  That is where the message of the book of Job reaches in to grab us.  Okay, there are a lot of messages in the book of Job, but the strongest message is not one that most people usually speak of. 

Job’s experience teaches us that in our desperation and pain our only hope is to cry out to God and keep crying out.  If you feel like God does not hear you, it is okay to shout.  If you are hurting, it is alright to speak to Him in sobbing breaths.  When you feel that you are being treated unjustly, it is fine to defend yourself to God.  Moan to Him; yell at Him; plead with Him; weep to Him; whisper to Him.  You see, although Job was not doctrinally correct in everything that he said to and about God any more than his friends were, God commended Job in the end while condemning Job’s friends.  Why?  Because no matter what happened, Job was turning to his Lord for solutions to his situation.  Job focused on God in his pain and desperation, even when he was challenging God to give him a chance to defend himself for being unjustly hurt. The lesson from Job is to never stop speaking to God as you experience the crucibles of life.

I am not going to claim that every time that you pray, you will suddenly gain relief from your problems.  That did not happen for Job, and it usually does not happen for me either.  In fact, I am not even going to tell you that you will receive strength to face the next devastating punch that life delivers.  I have been left broken and bleeding without any ability to do more than sob my eyes out often enough that I will never claim strength to face life’s traumatic experiences.  In those times, all I know is to cling to my Savior and beg for relief.  What I can promise you is that the only chance that any of us have to survive the crucibles in our lives without being crushed is to look to God and plead for Him to move in our lives and hearts.  Our only hope is to go through the pain with Jesus at our side, and that means praying from the depths of your pain to a God who loves you more than you will ever comprehend. 

By faith, we know that God is present, and He is acting even though we cannot see it and from our real-time perspective, nothing seems to be improving.  Unfortunately, even if we could figure out what God is doing, it might not bring us any relief.  This was the case for Job, who never had access to all of the behind-the-scenes information about his circumstances that readers of the Bible know.  What Job did receive was a close encounter with His God, and that was enough for him. 

If we are honest, we would all agree that life sucks.  Sin and evil have created an abundance of pain and desperation.  Our only hope of survival is to stick close to God, so keep talking to Him.  The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a season for everything, which means that someday, we can look forward to a time of peace. Someday, life won’t suck.  Someday, there will be no evil . . . but until that time, follow Job’s example and never stop communicating with God.