Sackcloth and Ashes: Travels with Job (2)
He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21 NASB
Taken away – Acceptance.
This is the Job answer to the first stage of catastrophe. God gives. It is a blessing to recognize that God is the author of my good fortune. God takes away. It is a virtue to realize that God is still the sovereign power behind my circumstances. Either way, God deserves my worship.
Catastrophe is simply the reminder that I am not god. I do not control my destiny. The universe does not conform to my rational desires. In some sense, catastrophe is an essential ingredient in spirituality. I do not mean to suggest that it is necessary. God intended that we become human in dialogue with the divine without pain. But we have all chosen otherwise. We have turned from the open invitation to dialogue because we do not like the necessity of subordination. The result is a world of pain. While pain was not essential, it has now become necessary. It is the single, clarifying occurrence that confirms the need for dialogue. Pain re-establishes the order of subordination whether we like it or not. Pain is the antidote to fantasy. It is the cure for denial.
In Job, we see the proper response to pain. Acceptance. Not stoic acknowledgment. Not fatalistic admission. Acceptance has both a positive and a negative movement. First, acceptance positively engages me with reality. I accept what I cannot change. I face my circumstances without denial or animosity because I acknowledge that I am also a created being under the hand of God. Job can say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away” because Job understands that what is created has no rights except those given by the Creator. To accept pain is to agree that God is God and He has the authority to do what He pleases with His creation. That He chooses to grant me peace, prosperity and blessing is entirely a decision of His grace, not of my worth. I have no grounds for complaint when He chooses otherwise. Does the clover complain when it is cut? Does the robin complain when the nest is destroyed in a fire? Does the mountain complain when the glacier scrapes away its majesty?
The negative movement hidden in pain is the desire for domination. This domination begins with the denial that life should include suffering. When I reject my existence as a created part of someone else’s universe, I establish an egocentric view of life. This view demands that life either behave according to my edicts or explain why it is an unruly child. The egocentric view of life presupposes my right to control. When I move toward the negative side of pain, I move toward a world that flies the banner of self-determination from the highest spire. I usually call this by the fictitious name, “Freedom.” I can never have this kind of freedom until I am able to subdue all of those forces and threats that limit my self-determination. Therefore, the negative movement of pain pushes me toward the desire for greater and greater domination over my world, exactly the opposite direction encouraged by the positive movement of pain. I seek to become god rather than accept God. I seek control rather than submission. Pain and suffering is the fulcrum point of this delicate balance. In the West, pain is wrong! It has no legitimate purpose, spiritual or otherwise, than to encourage my mastery over it by force or contrivance. Pain is anti-human and I must do all I can to bring it into submission. In this kind of world, I must become my own god. But Job reminds us that we are not and since we are not, we must learn what pain has to teach us.
Topical Index: acceptance, pain, purpose, Job 1:21
I’m so grateful for the years of lessons which you have presented. I feel the Ethiopian eunuch’s joy after his encounter with Philip. I will accept and continue on. May your cup of blessings overflow.
Me Too!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow. I’m a newcomer to Skip. Yesterday’s and this post have spoken to my heart inaway that cannot be articulated with words. I think the comments by readers were just as helpful! I am not God, I am not the master of my universe, I have no right to expect that life conform to my western notions of equity — what novel ideas! Good grief, and it’s only taken 65 years for me to start to get this. Why, God, couldn’t you have shown me this 40 years ago? Oops, careful there, Mark.
Submission is the crucible.
We naturally serve ourselves and depend on all we think and know.
But serving ourselves keeps us insulated from everything — especially God.
It’s not until we painfully “see” that we naturally stand apart from Him that reality
comes into focus.
Then we have to decide. Really decide.
Giving Him our independent head doesn’t move the meter. Giving Him our stubborn
heart gives Him the joy of returning ours now re-aligned with His heart. If it’s a real transaction,
real transformation ensues.
The hardest part of submission is that first step. Giving up our individual independence
to becoming one with Him seems impossible — until we DO!
“Acceptance positively engages me with reality”. This is the first of the steps back to sanity – to a state of trust. I think insanity is the state of fracture from (distrust of) reality, whether it be altered states of addiction, the suffering of rejection, the surreal experience of panic, fear and stress, or the embrace of beliefs that do not match that reality. Anything that moves me away from connection with reality – anything that breaks my trust bond with reality – results in the insanity that sin produces. I have started to call it “insinity”.
Pain alerts me to a break with God, self, others, or reality. Pain says “stop!”. It is interesting to me that suffering is optional, but without suffering we do not learn from our pain. In the book Descartes Error, Demasio, the author, devised an experiment that would help determine exactly why people with impaired frontal lobes lack an ability to learn from pain, or, negative experience. I mean, these people just do not suffer (emotional response to pain) the way we do. What he invented was a gambling game, with consequences geared to reward conservative, progressively responsive moves to a series of losses that would teach the players what the hidden rules were. Well, the frontal lobe patients never learned. He concluded, in part, that they no longer had the ability to retain the information that suffering provided long enough to develop a delayed – gratification plan for the future. He concluded “We might describe the predicament of these patients as a “myopia for the future,” a concept that has been proposed to explain the behavior of individuals under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. Inebriation does harrow the panorama of our future, so much so that almost nothing but the present is processed with clarity.” ( He cites C.M Steele and R. A. Josephs (1990), Alcohol myopia, AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 45:921-33.)
I have decided that the suffering that sin produces, in the sinner as well as the sinner’s innocent (or complicit) victims, was designed to teach us to avoid that sin (or sinner!) in the future. Well, the problem comes when we decide to avoid the suffering instead of the sin, I think. It is the very hallmark of insanity to repeat actions over and over expecting a different result, but it is also insane to short-circuit our ability to learn from our experience. It takes a special sort of choices to do that short-circuiting. Thanks to this book, I have decided to call this set of choices “self frontal lobotomy”, now that I know where the defect has to be located. I think sin lobotomizes us, but we can choose to continue that lobotomy by various sorts of inebriating choices and actions, too, in an attempt to avoid suffering the consequences of the last sin. Those would be addictive behaviors and mindsets, which range far beyond just that “influence of alcohol and other drugs”.
I think sin comes with its very own tranquilizers, in the form of lies and temptations to various inebriating behaviors, which, when we believe (or do) them, cause our brains and bodies to fracture (distrust) from reality even more. What is particularly pernicious, however, is that the sin that others do TO US also comes with a seductive set of tempting beliefs and behaviors that are ALSO designed to keep us from suffering! The instant the victim falls into those temptations, however, they become a part of their own problem. Nasty! (Y’all, sin is not fair!) We want to believe those lies and participate in those inebriating thoughts and behaviors because we want to avoid suffering the consequences of our (or others) choices, but without that suffering, we are never going to learn where to put our trust. (I know that I quit actively suffering from the sins others did to me when I learned that I should quit trusting them in the places I should have been trusting God (or myself, even) instead.)
Titus 2:12 warns us to “live soberly… in this present world”. Unfortunately, that would involve acceptance of the suffering of the sin that surrounds us, too. No cheaping out. Pain is there to inoculate us against all future possibility of sin in the next world, too (there is no random, senseless suffering). I bet we meet a whole lot of folks who did not know God from Adam but who learned all they needed to know about sin for eternity just by suffering from the choices of others. I pray that I can learn to keep my focus on that future, too, even without suffering, like Skip says.
Romans 5:3,4 says that suffering is the gym that produces the essential muscles of “perseverance, character and hope”. Guess we aren’t going to get those particular muscles, though, if we continue to try to avoid that suffering. Right on, Job! Gotta love his perseverance, character and hope!
A funny thing happened to me on my way to childhood.
When I was a toddler I fell from the top of a playground slide onto the hard blacktop surface (yes, believe it not, in ancient days most playgrounds were hard surfaced and not the sand or soft synthetic materials used today). As a result of that fall I suffered a closed Frontal Lobe, Traumatic Brain Injury. The frontal lobes are extremely vulnerable to injury in infants and toddlers which then affects their still forming brain in staggering ways. This fall from grace negatively impacted my thinking, judgements, perceptions, personality, emotions..in sum my entire being and my future. Laurita’s quote from the book Descartes Error by neurologist António Damásio added insight as to why I lacked an ability “to learn from pain or negative experience”. Those who have been on this site for a while may recall my testimony from a few years ago where I described my wretched life that was filled with mental illness, jail, divorces, institutionalizations, abandonment of my children, homelessness and frequent suicide attempts. (I like to think of that brutality honest sharing of my history as being authentic and therapeutic, but some may see it as symptomatic of my lack of judgment and impulse control, common symptoms of TBI). The saddest part of the story may be that my brain injury went medically undiagnosed for 60 plus years. Sadly neither my mother or my father (or anyone else, including myself) was aware that this accident was the root cause of my lifelong difficulties, both mental, emotional and social. My altered behavior was variously described by my parents and others as “rebelliousness, irresponsibility, willfulness, mental illness, even demonic oppression” and as a result my father was determined to beat some sense into me or break my will. He failed in the former, but was successful in the latter. Despite the fact that my mother had told me of this accident in a passing conversation years ago and that psychiatrists over the years had strongly hinted at the possibility of a TBI due to my lifelong aberrant behavioral patterns no one ever put 2 + 2 together, including myself.
It wasn’t until I was 62 years old and had accepted employment as a caregiver in an Assisted Living Facility (ALF) for the brain injured in Florida that I became aware of my own diagnoses. As it happened I was assigned to closely monitor and supervise adult ambulatory TBI clients who were determined to be “at risk” …of flight, fight or foolery. It wasn’t long until I became acutely aware that “they were me and I was them”! The “at risk” behavioral problems of my clients that I was tasked with monitoring (and hopefully helping them to avoid) were the exact same behaviors that had become the cobblestones on the convoluted pathways of my broken life. I recognized the thought patters, the mental process, the mannerisms, the coping mechanisms that I had both successfully and unsuccessfully used throughout my disjointed life. This personal epiphany began a new chapter in my life where (in time) I became less tortured about the troubled road I had travelled, less angry with my self for the poor choices I had made in life (and they were legion), more understanding of my limitations, incapacities and disabilities, more forgiving of my foibles, faults and failures, (as well as forgiving those who had hurt me) and more tolerant of others whose story I do not know and whose difficult journey I cannot fathom.
I went 61 years (basically my entire life) with a TBI that went undiagnosed and therefore without treatment. In addition, the coping mechanisms I learned to employ as a child and as a teenager to keep my sanity and to protect my virgin and vunurable self idenity added several mental illnesses to my already flailing affective repertoire. Dissociative disorder, Depression, Co-dependency became unwelcome bed partners. Oy Vey. It seems in life, like football, when there is a fumble expect a pile on. Through all this I had no support group or even friends and family to lean on. I found no compassion at any turn. There was no understanding ear to hear my fears or strong hand to dry my tears. For too long I didn’t know what to live for or believe in and it seemed, in my fractured brain, there was no hope of even hoping (sigh). It is a miracle that I am still alive and no longer “kicking against the pricks”. Thank you Yeshua for saving me from the miry clay. However, the main reason I share my updated testimony with the members of this community is the hope that no one who has suffered a TBI or any other physical, emotional or mental trauma will ever be left to their own imaginings, sufferings, confusion, depression and pain without a measure of support, love, compassion and hope from this corner of the ring. If I can succour or lend an ear please feel free to contact me at Stanleynm@aolDOTcom. Shalom.
Michael, in the time I have known you, of you, and about you, I have never sensed that you were a person who ducked suffering, or was insensitive to the suffering of others. You have suffered PLENTY, brother! And learned, too! Where sin abounds, there does grace abound even more. That gives hope to me and thee. Those supposedly ‘unhealable’ diagnoses? I shucked a few, myself. Grace of God. Lessons gained, move on. Let us not be weary in welldoing. The times of refreshing will catch up. They really will.
Thank you for modeling that willingness to trust so necessary for the rest of us to reach out and touch. We are the source of so much pain to ourselves and others, but we are also the chosen vector – the hands and feet – of the great Healer of all pain. Let us all learn, through friendship, to be tender to the wounds we have all gained “in the house of (our) friends”, and may that friendship, by the grace of God, succeed in the healing we all now need.
Thank you, my brother, for surviving, and a big shout out to Arnella! Whoo, sister!
Michael I tried your email but it did not work for me.? bandjodem@gmailDOTcom
” (I know that I quit actively suffering from the sins others did to me when I learned that I should quit trusting them in the places I should have been trusting God (or myself, even) instead.)”
I appreciated what you wrote Laurita, and I especially resonated with this sentence above. However, how do you regain trust in God when the very core of your being feels so let down by his lack of intervention in the midst of traumatic events? I suppose this specific lack of trust is what is keeping me from relinquishing control of my life. The very thought of submitting my life to the control of a God who I feel betrayed me is heartwrenching and scary as hell. If I lay my self-protection down, how do I know for sure that God will have my back this time?
Dear Claudia,
You just put your finger on the core of my own rage at God, for the exact same reasons. I have never felt so righteously vindicated as when I realized how very angry I was at Him. It felt right! I was furious! It wasn’t that I had ever actively chosen to screw up, or betray anybody, or even to not forgive or love in spite of betrayal. I was so angry because I KNEW I had done my very best, but I also knew that I had never had a chance; a real chance to start off on the right foot. I was chasing ambulances and desperately trying to stop disaster that was NOT my fault from day one, and the people I loved, including me, were having the same problems. We were all bad off, and getting worse. I tried going to church and everything I was told. Praying? Those prayers hit the ceiling and bounced off. Good girl? Just another way to get slammed. Trust? Just painted a bigger target on my back. Obey the Commandments? Try telling someone on the chain gang that they have the luxury of resting on Saturday! I had no real choices, and the ones I could and did make didn’t work. Angry? There isn’t a word for feeling so totally betrayed.
This stuff just was not working for me, and it was all because of the choices of others around me. It didn’t help that a lot of those choices were made by people who swept me under their rug so that they could continue to go to church and be accepted in that community; all they had to do was to throw us under the bus. No one asked the women and children what they wanted, however. To touch us and reach out to fix what was wrong (justice) would have exposed the dirty underside of people who had the ability and power to blame the victims instead. Yep, not a whole lot of choices available for certain segments of society, in certain communities. I mean, I was willing to forgive and forget, but the damage was still there, and my choices still did not exist. Skip is right. There is nothing fair about living on this planet. Rage against the injustice all you want; first lesson is, rage is futile. Next lesson: forgive and forget still does not fix the damage. The choices others make still have power over their disenfranchised victims. Y’all, it sucks to be a widow or orphan (no powerful man to negotiate ‘rights’ for you) on this planet. Trust? That is just another way to give the abusers the ability to continue trashing you. How do you pull out of this tailspin? Every word in the Good Book was impotent or corrupted (or co-opted) for me. None of it worked for me. I had to throw it all away and start over.
I found myself in Alanon because I had been trained to codepend the sins of others. The 12 Steps, Traditions and Concepts have been hammered out to teach people how to pull out of this disfunctional way to relate to God, themselves and others. All in the name of love, of course. Codependence is what sinners FORCE their victims to do so they don’t have to suffer their own consequences. This happens in churches as readily as it does in alcoholic homes. The very core of injustice is to be required to suffer someone else’s consequences. The very nastiest part of the greasy grace teaching is that it is designed, I truly feel, to let abusers off the hook of justice, and keep their victims on. At that point, everything about God can, and is, used against the victims. They are taunted with their impotence, and God is portrayed as not available, either. Trust in God, self and others is turned to dust.
Job found himself in this place.
I am interested to see Skip develop this subject. It takes a lot to learn to trust again. I spent a while on Step One in Alanon which says “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Substitute any sin for “alcohol” and you have it. By that time, I knew I was powerless, so that wasn’t too hard. Step 2 says “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I decided to try that one backwards by saying that I believed that nothing ELSE could do that, which I had found by experience. Step 3, however, was where I got stuck. It says “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” I couldn’t do it. I finally decided to work that one backwards, too. I started with “as we understood Him” and so I invented a God that I felt I would not be mad at, and wrote all those characteristics down. I looked at it, and realized that I did not think God was like that, so I got honest (and brave!) and decided to write down all that I really believed God was, and that list was awful! Well, I decided to throw that God in the trash and pretend the other one was mine instead. At that point, I took a closer look, and, lo and behold, my ‘good’ God looked just like the one in the Bible! I was mad at the wrong God! I laughed. That was my turning point.
Trust? I decided to do it for microseconds at a time. Baby steps. Really tiny ones.
Let’s see where Skip goes with Job. He still has a hole to pull out of, too.
Thank you for sharing, and for being honest. I am still struggling, too, believe it or not. You helped me, today, Claudia. Let’s keep dialoguing.
This is going to an important journey for a lot of us. It took me more than 2 years to come to the place of writing about this. It’s not done, but it’s enough to get started.
Is YHWH to blame??? In Job’s case God permitted it does not mean he approved…. So did he permit a lot of unjust things but never failed to reward and turn the injustices around before it was too late.
May you all find peace to accept the uncontrollable and passion to embrace the privileges to change the things you can control.
Thank you Laurita, I’ll try changing the order of how some of the 12 steps are written and see if that works for me. I agree with taking the entire trust issue very slowly. I think that’s the only way it will work for me. Interestingly enough, I used to ask God to show up in a BIG way and then I’d be able to trust him. Well, that didn’t happen. Brene Brown proves with her Jelly Bean Jar that trust is earned slowly and incrementally so I suppose research is on the side of taking things slowly. 🙂
Thank you sharing so much Laurita. I’ve already gone back and reread your post a few times and each time something else pops up that I can relate to. I’m glad that we’re all on this journey together; the support is comforting.
We are stumbling together, then, Claudia. Honestly, I think I was taught that I had to UNQUESTIONABLY trust God, but was not taught well how to qualify trust in general. I did not know how to “taste” the Lord; in other words, figure out how trust looks like applied to life. What I was required to do, however, was to put unqualified trust in others, but NOT to trust my own impressions, feelings and takes on situations. Children, in particular, were to be seen and not heard. I learned not to hear myself, either. In situations where people in authority and power, especially in a religious setting, I think, hide behind religion while making choices that ruin the lives of others for advantage, the others learn codependence and all sorts of other bad habits and ways of thinking about God, too (especially children, who automatically apply their experience with authority to their experience with God). These wrong approaches to reality have to be questioned, torn down and relearned BEFORE trust is understood properly or applied correctly (qualified). ‘
I think codependency is where we put trust in the wrong places. This is why it does not work to connect us properly to God, ourselves and others, like it is supposed to. We get confused as to WHEN to put trust correctly in whom, and when it is being misapplied. I need someone to write a book that shows us the ‘trust’ rules, as interpreted correctly out of the Bible, because lots of abusers LOVE their victims to be trying to follow the Bible, and love, because they can corrupt that desire so much easier. This stuff has ruined many a life. Still working my way out of this!
If I remember correct we must not put trust in the arm of flesh, neither in the man of God but to only trust in God. Yeshau made the statement that when we trust in him, I accept his teachings associated with supporting evidence eg miracles etc I will abide in him and he and god will make their abode in me. Or was it have faith in…
That is true, Seeker, but I think trauma is experienced as trauma precisely because it tends to shatter, at some level, our sense of connection with – our understanding of – God. Disaster exposes the untested blank spaces that were just airbrushed to look like the real thing. As nobody’s understanding of God is solid enough to withstand all that life flings at us, I think most honestly lived lives come to a crisis point. Like Job, we have no idea that our best guess as to how to deal with things like kids living careless lives, or what to do if the wealth disappears is not good enough. There is only our fear to instruct us, and that instruction is not enough. To ditch the fear, we must face the holes tragedy exposes, and rebuild from there.
I don’t think Job struggled with those fears the next time around. I bet he made sure he warded them off at the pass by raising careful kids and by realizing that wealth can come and go, and that he could still be ok. Revelation tells us that outside the city will be the FEARFUL. Tragedy forces us to face fear and deal with it. This is why we are told that God puts the fears of all His children to the test. Those tests are uniquely designed to cure our belief in lies. Truth is to be found at the bottom of every disaster, if we face it.
It is one thing for Scripture to tell us the truth; it is another to learn that truth by experience.
Thank you Laurita
I agree with what you say. In retrospection I need to clarify that trauma as shocking and discouraging as it is may never be personalised. We are not to blame, did not contribute towards, did not deserve the experience it is a way of life found in every sphere of live. Animals hunt and kill to survive so what it is their blueprint… Really…
Humans life through life and grow through experience. Trauma makes us humble towards life and stronger towards others. It shatters our self worth but strengthens our self sufficiency. We need to learn from the experience but never forget our perceived wrongs. The reason being that when we accept that the wrong is but our fear turning on we can deal with the fear and move forward. Trauma is hard to forget and the worst part is when our protective coat slips off and the memory is reinforced PTSD then manifests and we then surrender life and survive in fear. That Laurita is how deep trauma cuts… But is God to blame? No, the fact that we survived the trauma is grace not towards us but towards those that he orchestrates to cross our paths and be uplifted through our reflections. May YHWH shine his countenance upon you.
My wife and I just got home from New York City. Last Tuesday we were on bicycles in Central Park. Then we walked the Brooklyn Bridge. As you no doubt are now aware, a terrorist in a rental truck in lower Manhattan ran over a number of people who were simply doing the same thing we were doing… riding bicycles on a bike path. Their families are no doubt devastated by the turn of events. Sobering to me was the announcement that the plan was actually to drive up the pedestrian area of Brooklyn Bridge and kill as many walkers as possible in the process. I am not sure why some people were in the wrong place at the wrong time and what possible sense any of this makes… randomly running people over with a truck. (8 people died) Maybe it doesn’t need to make any more sense than somebody drowning in a hurricane or city pool for that matter.