The
real miracle may not be that God gave Job more children, but that Job chose to
have them.
The
pockmarked patriarch has just come through a rough stretch in which he learned,
among other things, that good behavior is no guarantee of a good life. God,
much like T. S. Eliot’s willful feline the Rum-Tum Tugger, “will do/As he do do/And there's no doing anything
about it!” Job had come to the place of honesty that C. S. Lewis found in his
grief over the death of his wife: “Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God
forgive God.’”
Oh,
the Almighty coughs up at the end. Like a thief caught with his hand in the
potsherd (Ex 22.4), the Lord doubles-down on Job’s undeserved losses. But first
God forces the old sheik to sign a pre-nup that indemnifies the Sovereign
against any future mishaps: “Therefore
I have declared that which I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me,
which I did not know.” Job is no longer an energetic and idealistic young man
who dreams of watching his offspring score winning touchdowns and graduate
summa cum laude. Bouncing infants on your knee irritates the infantigo scars,
and past failures can poison future fantasies.
Still,
Job embraces God’s offer of another go-round on the barebacked bucking bronc of
an uncertain life in the redemption rodeo. Perhaps the most significant feature
of the story is the handles he gives his daughters. Roughly translated, he
calls them Dove, Cinnamon, and Dark Eyes, Hebrew stripper-names that celebrate
sensuality, beauty, and the joy of life.
Sometimes
the real question of faith is not whether we can praise God in the face of a
grief that seems endless, but whether we can do so in the teeth of a happiness
that seems only too likely to end. At such times we do well to remember that
the heavenly Father who sent angels to celebrate His Son’s birth also sent
angels to celebrate that Son’s resurrection. That Lord pitched parties on
either side of the grave should challenge us that having the nerve to be happy
may be a more daredevilish act of faith than having the resolve to grieve.
C.
S. Lewis took a trip to Whipsnade in late September. When he wrote about the
experience later, he recalled blooming bluebells, though they could not
actually have been there that late in the season. His contemporary T. S. Eliot
took a trip to Little Gidding in May. When he wrote about the experience later,
he remembered it as a snowscape. Sometimes faith means daring to see the bluebells
that don’t yet exist, rather than the snow that eventually might.
Faith
is the Victory,
Doug
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