Daily Devotion for Lent 2025, Day 17

Today's Reading: Job, Chapter Seventeen

There comes a time when we experience depression when we may give up.  One might say that Job is vacillating between depression and acceptance.  He acknowledges that things are not going to get better.  He also recognizes that others scorn him.

When people believe that they are in the hands of forces beyond their control and that spiritual powers are at work to undermine their lives, this can be a helpless feeling for sure.  They may be afraid to get too close to a person who is undergoing tragic circumstance because they may fear that it is contagious like a disease.  If a person has offended the gods (or God), and we're not sure what they did, the natural reaction would be to avoid them "like the plague" because we certainly don't want the same results in our lives.

This is why we see in verse six, that Job states, God "has made me a byword of the peoples, and I am one before whom people spit."

This image likely conjures negative feelings!

The spitting before a person was an ancient near east practice intended to ward off the evil that had descended upon the person or household.  The practice may have been as common as applying hand sanitizer today after you shake hands with someone and then see them cough.  

Either practice can make the person feel like a pariah, but it allows the person doing the spitting or applying the sanitizer some feeling of control over the chaos of life.    And of course, today, we believe in the efficacy of our practice, but they likely did as well.

Job is mourning his future in verse eleven when he says, "My days are past; my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart."

All of us know what it is to be surprised by change whether that be through death or illness or accident.  All of a sudden, the plans we had made are no more.  We must mourn our assumed future as much as we mourn our loved ones.  This can be a difficult task.

If we get to the point where we give up, sometimes things can change to give us hope.  As we move through Lent, we would say that our faith can give us hope.  Our friends and family can give us hope.  Some people seem to have natural resolve that bolsters them to give them hope.  

When chaos is swirling all around, how do we as people of faith not only find hope, but offer it to the world?

Prayer for the day:

O Lord, in whom is our hope, remove far from us, we pray, empty hopes and presumptuous confidence.  Make our hearts so right with your most holy and loving heart, that hoping in you we may do good; until that day when faith and hope shall be abolished by sight and possession, and love shall be all in all.  Amen.

Prayer by Christina Rossetti, England, 19th Century

Photo by Ви Го via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons license

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.