There are coyotes in Pennsylvania. Not just upstate, rural, Potter County coyotes, but also a growing population of urban and suburban coyotes. In counties wiped clean of carnivores a hundred years ago or more, in the land of Walgreens and Wendy’s, coyotes have slunk in after dark and made themselves at home. And apparently (this defies every logic of the suburban mind), Pennsylvania coyotes, interbred with ill-tempered Canadian wolves, are even bigger than Montana coyotes or South Dakota coyotes. So people say.
I have lived in the Philadelphia suburbs for most of my 55 years and had never seen a coyote. Until I did. At 10:00 at night, within the city limits, lit up by my headlights, I saw a coyote trotting down a residential street. It disappeared into the dark, but all doubt was removed: they are here. This is a thing.
Wild carnivorous animals live, not just “out there” somewhere, but here, near me.
Making Sense of Adversity
In a similar way, our lives and the lives of those close to us are not immune to adversity or danger. When trouble comes, it can leave us reeling, unsure how to make sense of what happened and why. This shock and bewilderment isn’t a new phenomenon. In the book of Job, three friends come to sit with Job, a righteous man who, in a whirlwind of sudden tragedies, has experienced both the complete loss of his family and also total financial ruin. It’s a disaster beyond words, and for a week the friends have the good sense not to speak. But then one of them cannot help himself anymore. “As I have observed,”he says, “those who sow trouble reap it”(4:8 NIV). This man, trying to make sense of the horror of what had happened to his friend, had come to what seemed to him the only logical conclusion: Job must have done something terrible to make it happen. “I’m just sayin’ . . . ”
This friend’s assumption mirrors a common way that people interpret trouble and suffering: it happens to people who have it coming. Tragedies don’t come out of nowhere, they reason. Job takes in what his friends say and feels the insult added to his injury, telling them that they have withheld kindness from a friend (6:14). “You too have proved to be of no help; you see something dreadful and are afraid” (6:21).
You see something dreadful and are afraid. It’s a good way to interpret the failure of friendship that suffering people often experience. It’s as if a coyote has been spotted in the neighborhood, and, in denial, people begin to inch away. They studiously avoid eye contact. They see calamity happen to someone close and often instinctively back up. Why? This thing that you have experienced is terrifying to me. It’s come too close. In a desperate attempt to create distance between trouble and themselves, “friends” default back to an old tactic: You must have done something wrong. In one way or another, there must be something about you that places you in a different category from me. You’re the kind of person these things happen to. Coyotes live in Montana. Or maybe in Potter County. But not here.
But we cannot cast aspersions on the fearful friends. It’s hard to get your head around trouble. Some of us have a more intimate experience of it than others. Or maybe I’m familiar with this kind of trouble, but not that. There are some troubles we only observe at a distance (perhaps a prayer request about a friend’s coworker), and some difficulties that impact people closer in, in a circle of relationship not so very far away (your best friend’s marriage suddenly fell apart). Sometimes the concentric circles get a little tighter, and we realize: Divorce can happen in my family, after all. Addiction happens to people like me. Trouble is not just an “out there somewhere” experience. In order to love my suffering neighbor, I need to open myself up to the reality that their experience could just as easily befall me.
Sometimes fears are realized, even inside my own house. Job names it: “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me”(3:25).
Do Not Fear
The friends had seen Job’s trouble and reacted in fear. What would have been a helpful alternative? What do better friends do? Job tells them what he needs from them: “But now be so kind as to look at me” he pleads(6:28). Don’t just see my trouble and avert your eyes—see me. Engage this reality: I’m not, after all, in a different category of person. Look, it’s me. See me in my humanity, listen to my experience. Trouble happens to people like you and me.
There’s a lovely psalm, Psalm 112, that is full of deeply encouraging truth. Nonetheless, it sounds as if it was written in an alternate universe from the book of Job. In the world of Psalm 112, people who fear the Lord (like, for instance, Job) are told that they can expect blessing and deliverance. Perhaps most poignantly, the psalm says: “They will have no fear of bad news” (v. 7). But how so? Why should I not fear?
These words seem to offer something like the comfort you give to a child afraid of vampires in the closet: “Shhh. You do not have to be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you. You are completely safe.” That sounds a lot like saying, there are no coyotes in Pennsylvania. Is this the reason we aren’t supposed to be afraid?
Unfortunately, the horse is out of the barn. I know there are coyotes here. Trouble happens to people like me.
Psalm 112 is not wrong. It speaks truth from 30,000 feet. It depicts a life in which present sufferings have been swallowed up by future glories. And that is deeply helpful for your soul and mine.
But there is a wisdom, too, that comes from closer in, where the 30,000-foot perspective may be elusive. It’s a wisdom that says, I know that trouble will come. As it came to Job, as it came to Jesus, it will come to me. But God has said, ‘I will be with you. I will never forsake you. And I will redeem all things. This is not the end.’ “All things work together for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
God does not want us to live in denial of trouble—not of ours nor of those near us. Nor does he want us to keep our distance when it happens. He calls us to be present in our own circumstances–not looking for an escape hatch or an alternative life. He calls us to be present with our friends who suffer. And he calls us, in all things, to be awake and alive to Christ, the Lamb who was slain, now alive forever, on the move, working out redemption, even now. The kingdom of Jesus has intruded into this present dangerous world, allowing us now to live with a daring, faith-filled hope instead of fear.
Job: Where Is God in My Suffering?
The book of Job is an agonizing journey through the suffering of a godly man. We listen to his heart-wrenching thoughts and prayers and feel his confusion. Each person inevitably reads this story out of their own experience with suffering and disappointment. Marc Davis guides readers to understand the message of Job more fully, helping them reflect on Job’s suffering and their own in relationship to the suffering of Jesus.
