Today's reading: Job, Chapter Thirty-eight
Well, God does finally show up again in Job - and for the first time in the prose section.
God comes across with a haughtiness that presents as more aloof than reassuring. How could God possibly be concerned about your affairs when God is busy tending to the ordering of the universe?
This feel is very different from Jesus' telling us that God knows the number of hairs on our head.
As we are reminded that Job experiences this from a sense of grief, it may feel different to imagine Job coming to this realization about God as a self-discovery rather than God berating him verbally.
For Job, the whirlwind may have been all of the terrible losses he experienced all at once. As he moved through denial, anger, bargaining and depression, he may have painfully arrived at acceptance. Within this acceptance is often a realization that we are not at the center of the universe.
This can be a painful, difficult journey (and some people never get there), but it often leads to greater maturity.
It may be that out of our pain, we discover God in the vastness of the created order which surrounds us. And rather than feel smaller and insignificant, as we remember and realize that just as God counts the stars (Pleiades and Orion), God also counts the hairs on our heads.
How does our faith coincide with the vastness of God in order to provide you connection and meaning rather than the opposite?
Prayer for the day:
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth! You made your glory higher than heaven! From the mouths of nursing babies you have laid a strong foundation because of your foes, in order to stop vengeful enemies. When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made— the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place— what are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them? You’ve made them only slightly less than divine, crowning them with glory and grandeur. You’ve let them rule over your handiwork, putting everything under their feet— all sheep and all cattle, the wild animals too, the birds in the sky, the fish of the ocean, everything that travels the pathways of the sea. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth! Amen.
Prayer is Psalm 8 from the Common English Bible © 2011 by Common English Bible
Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash
New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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