#Job #wisdom #God #world #suffering #ministryofpresence

 

Job 38

Then God comes in a storm. Thundering his mightiness, showering his holiness, blowing his grace across Job’s Face.

“Who are you to question me?” God asks…..

and God shows who God is to Job

Job 42

Job repents, realizing who God is… Job says that he had “heard” God before, but this is the first time he “saw him”

 

So why does God show up in the storm?

•I do NOT think God was yelling at Job for complaining

•I do NOT think God was TRYing scare Job: although “fear of God” was probably a side effect”

 

Godly Encounter (warning, side effects may include “the fear of God”)
 
I think that when Job glimpsed God, when Job got an inkling of how/who/what God was…
I think when Job felt the MAGNITUDE of God’s LOVE
He realized that knowing the whys and wherefores, having all the answers….being “right” was not going to give him enough to UNDERSTAND the workings of the universe.
 
A better window, was to understand who God is and that God is present
When I was 5 I busted my lip open riding a bike, just before it was to be loaded on the moving truck. I was riding it around one last time, hit a rock and split my lip open. All the way there I cried.
When I got there, they had to put stitches in, and they surrounded me with a curtain. I was on painkillers.
I was crying for my mother
My mom said she was afraid that she was cutting off the circulation to my hand, she was squeezing it so hard, but even though she kept trying to tell me she was just behind the curtain and she was holding my hand–I couldn’t see her.
 
And when I finally did see her….it didn’t make everything better. The pain didn’t go away, I didn’t understand any better what exactly it was the doctors were doing to me.
But I felt better.
That is (I think) how Job felt….once he knew God was there, it didn’t fix things, but it did make things better.
 
And if we get back to what our call is as  Church, as the Body of Christ, as Christians, that is our call. We can’t fix everything (sadly), we can’t. But our call is to be present. Our call is to recognize the Holy Spirit is at work in every being. Our call is to make even those who suffer–a little bit better
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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

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