A Whirlwind Encounter
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In the summer of 1984, I was two-and-a-half years into a strenuous contention with chronic pain. I was mowing the grass at my first home on Bilglade Road. What was normally a mindless task, was on this day fraught with contention.
God was trying to get me to read the Book of Job. I was telling Him that I'd already read Job and didn't intend to do so again. Back and forth I went with the mower, and back and forth the contentiousness went.
For a variety of reasons, I didn't trust God any farther than I could throw Him. I was a Christian, bound for heaven when I died, but on earth my singular goal was to stay as far from God as I could.
When God showed up, bad things happened.
My plan? Stay out of His way, off of His radar; no mistakes, no sins, nothing to capture His attention.
Like the prophet Job, who was a righteous man, who made sacrifices just in case he'd forgotten a sin, and made sacrifices for his children just in case they had sinned and not realized it, I too was a righteous man. Exemplary. Recognized for my religious fidelity. Committed to discerning what was right, then doing what was right. I made very few mistakes.
Like Job, there was no reason for God to bother with me. Surely, He has other matters to tend to than the petty refinement of an already good man. Said another way, as Job does numerous times throughout his book, it would be so unreasonable as to prove unjust for God to interfere with my life.
But God does interfere with Job's life. While Job is diligently doing his best, God goads Satan into attacking the righteous man, Job. By the end of Chapter Two, Job's world is in ruins. His children are dead. His wealth is gone. His wife has abandoned him and his health is broken.
Job did nothing to deserve this calamity. Had God minded His own business and left Job alone, none of his pain would have ensued. But God, seemingly for nothing better to do, inserts himself into Job's life. The result is a calamitous nightmare of chronic suffering for forty-two chapters.
All of this biblical awareness coursed through my head as I pushed my lawnmower.
I had done nothing to deserve my pain. I simply stood up from the lunch table on March 17, 1982 and my back spasmed, twisting my spine into an S, leaving me gasping for breath inside a torso that couldn't expand in order to inhale.
By the summer of 1984 I had no further options. I had seen everyone who was anyone, explored all medical avenues, and subjected myself to barbaric alternatives. Nothing. I had confessed sins I'd never committed and humbly asked the elders to pray for me. Nothing. I prayed every prayer. Pleaded. The doors of heaven were locked and bolted shut.
God got me into this affliction, but like with Job, wouldn't come to the door of prayer to explain Himself, let alone release me from pain's persistence.
“Behold, I cry, ‘Violence!’ but I get no answer; / I shout for help, but there is no justice.” — Job 19:7
Where is God? The One who says He’s everywhere is not where I need Him to be.
“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, / and backward, but I do not perceive him; / on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; / he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him. / But he knows the way that I take; / when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.”
Like Job, I had every right to justify myself. Neither of us did anything wrong, let alone anything wrong enough to deserve this suffering.
But where was God? I knew where I was. Job knew where he was. Both of us were looking up, down, and sideways for God. Let’s talk! He was neither returning calls or making an appearance.
The consolation for Job and me? When God did choose to show up and see how the affliction He initiated was progressing, He would find that Job and I were both pure gold—and with this realization, the only reasonable thing to do would be to repent of the affliction He had instigated. “Oh, pardon guys. You didn’t deserve this. Let me make it right.”
Midway through my lawn mowing, I stopped in the middle of the front yard and said out loud, “Okay. I’ll read the Book of Job. Again. But I know how this story goes, and for the record, your insistence will likely be the end of us.”
I finished mowing, cleaned up, and sat down to read.
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More Than the Question of Suffering
The book of Job is often reduced to a single question: Why do good people suffer? But this reading barely scratches the surface of a 42-chapter wrestling match between a righteous man and the God he thought he knew. The length of Job’s book is instructive. This is not a quick lesson. It is a long, painful, unresolved excavation of a soul.
Job’s primary inquiry is not simply about suffering but about the apparent contradiction between God’s character and God’s silence. How can a righteous man be treated this way by a just God?
Job does not receive an answer to that question. What he receives instead is far more disorienting and far more transforming.
He receives God himself. The whirlwind in which God appears does not explain. It reveals.
What Job discovers in this revelation undoes him in the best possible way:
“I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” — Job 42:5
The suffering did not produce a just argument. It produced a divine encounter.
The encounter produced repentance—not for sin, as Job’s friends insist, but for the smallness of Job’s prior conception of God. He repented in dust and ashes, humbled not by defeat but by proximity.
The same occurred for me. I shed many tears, abandoned the arrogance of my self-righteousness, and encountered a God I had only heard about. Like my mentor, Job, once I saw God for who He truly is, I said, “I retract. Please accept my sincere apology. I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, things I knew nothing about. I repent” (cf. 42:1-6).
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A Secret Anniversary of the Heart
Job’s journey was forty-two chapters. My journey continues. On the seventeenth of this month, I will commemorate what Longfellow calls a secret anniversary of the heart. Not the anniversary of 16,060 days of pain, but the anniversary of life with a God I never knew until He condescended into my world to help me know and understand Him. It is the anniversary of a divine encounter.
James holds up Job’s persistence as the point worth noting, and rightly so (cf. 5:11). Forty-two chapters of refusing to let go—of God, of integrity, of the conversation itself. This is not a minor footnote. It is the whole story. Job’s restoration comes not despite his wrestling but through it.
But it is not only Job’s persistence. God persists as well—and Job encounters divine mercy.
God restores Job, but restoration still carries grief. Job’s new children don’t replace the ones buried. Suffering leaves a mark that prosperity and restoration cannot erase.
Yesterday I walked, then I sat on the bench in the median of Ward Parkway where our children, Alex and Anna, are memorialized. I reflected. I prayed. I grieved my embarrassment for persisting against God, but I celebrated His divine humility in coming to me and persisting for as long as I endured.
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The Pattern Across Job, Jesus, and Paul
Jesus enters this same territory in Philippians 2, but from the opposite direction. Job was a man pressed toward humility by circumstance. Jesus chose it. He emptied himself of reputation and humbled himself.
A few weeks ago, I asked my Older Brother about “making himself of no reputation” (cf. Phil. 2:7 KJV). He was quiet, a sacred reverential silence. Then, “Of all my suffering, the loss of reputation was the most difficult to bear. Not the nails, not the crown of thorns, but the willingness to be misunderstood, dismissed, mocked, and abandoned by the very creation I authored. To lay down what was rightfully mine and receive contempt in return. No physical anguish fully captures this affliction of the soul.”
“Of all my suffering, the loss of reputation was the most difficult to bear.”
It struck me that what followed, in terms of crucifixion, was horrific, but it grew from a humility Jesus had already chosen. His perfect obedience was to a heavenly Father who is fundamentally good. At the height of His suffering, my Older Brother prayed repeatedly—and heard only the bolting of heaven’s door against His pounding prayers for deliverance.
It is ludicrous to compare my journey with pain to Job’s or Jesus’, but it is wise to cast my pain against theirs and consider what they tell me of God.
As I have lost my reputation and societal standing, I have grieved. The loss is incomprehensible, but in my loss, the varnish of reputation has been stripped away to reveal Christ alone: “To me, to live, is Christ.” With greater conviction than I could have ever conceived, I now declare with Paul, “In Him, I live, and move, and have significance.”
Speaking of whom, Paul’s thorn completes the triangle of my thoughts (cf. 2 Cor. 12:7ff). He was given suffering, not as punishment, but as maintenance to prevent the inflation of pride. The thorn did violence to his self-sufficiency, his self-establishment. It kept him in the posture that Job arrived at through the whirlwind and that Jesus chose: dependent, humble, and paradoxically, fruitful.
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Suffering is not explained. It is used. And what it is used for, consistently, is the hollowing out of pride and the creation of space for God to be seen, known, and trusted more fully than comfort would ever allow.
All those years ago, I didn’t lose God after all. I encountered Him.
I recently spoke at Southcliff Church on the topic of identity in Christ and mental health. Here is a link if you would like to watch and listen.