Reliving Job

In college I had a Job experience, in which I felt like God was stripping away everything of value to me – my family, my friendships, my relationship, my academic career, and my health.  During that time, furious that God would not do what I wanted Him to do, I shook my fist at heaven and renounced my faith.  Eventually the Lord wooed me back to Himself and, when the scales fell from my eyes, I saw how He was always faithful, loving, and good, and that being God meant that He got to call the shots, and my role was to trust Him.

Today, I feel like I get a second chance at that Job experience, but this time to do it right.  Losing everything I care about – my marriage, my ministry, my chances at having a family, my reputation and name, many of my relationships – has been incredibly painful, but today I am armed with the knowledge that I lacked back then – a stronger understanding of who God is, that He is utterly trustworthy, and once I make it through the storm, blind with pain, my eyes will be opened at the end of the day and I will see what He was doing in all this mess.  I’ve learned not to question or throw God away in the pain but to cling to him with the desperate strength of a firm knowledge that He is my only way through it all.  

As I weather the storm, I feel like it’s a training ground.  Constant, blistering pain can be a faithful friend, revealing where my greatest temptations are – temptations to blame others, temptations to run to something less than God to ease the pain.  I told my prayer group the other night that I understand now why people “drunk-dial” others in their pain.  When you’re in great pain and your inhibitions are down, you want to reach out either for vengeance or a drunken night of mistakes.  (I made it clear to them that I’m NOT tempted to drunk-dial people – I don’t even drink – but it’s a metaphor for the kind of temptation that deep pain dangles before a hurting soul.)  It's so easy to run to sin rather than to the Lord.

My constant prayer is, Jesus, please keep me faithful and my thoughts clear and right.  Put a watch over my mouth, over my heart and mind.  I have found that one of my greatest weapons is transparency – no more secrets, no more hiding the ugly things going on in my household as I did all those years of my abusive marriage.  Having a housemate who is open to hearing my confessions is like a healthful tonic.  I notice that when I bring things into the light, God is faithful to vanquish them and there is relief from the temptation.  And it is far better to bring it into the light and kill it while it is still a new sprout, the faintest whisper of a sinful idea occurring in the mind, rather than after it’s taken strong root, grown up over your life, and taken over the heart.

And the exciting part is, if this is a training ground, what does God have for me next?  I have gotten mixed messages from the church – you are wrong, you are right, you are rebellious, you are faithful, you are unfit for future ministry, you are now uniquely equipped for a future ministry.  I’m still waiting breathlessly for God’s call on that last point.   What I do know is that one thing I’ve been told is patently false – that God can never be maximally glorified in my life now, and even though it still cuts me deeply when people say this to me, I’m grateful that the reason I know it’s false is because it doesn’t depend on me but on Him.   Lord, glorify Yourself in my life, let my brokenness shine Your goodness all the more in this fallen world.  My life means nothing if You do not glorify Yourself in it.  My life was made, I was created, for You to glorify Yourself in me.

In the last few months I spent much time being angry with people who were judging and condemning me without even asking me for my story – somehow the word “divorce” awakens a lion of wrath in some Christians, while the word “abuse” seems to evoke mostly compassion for my abusive husband who needs healing – but I realize now that they can’t help but think the way they do.  If they believe divorce is a mortal sin, and that it is always wrong, then wouldn’t they see my life as they do, as a ruined moral grave?   How could they approve anything I do, seeing me as a rebellious Jezebel who does just as she likes regardless of (what they believe to be) God’s law?  I understand where they’re coming from.  I was probably one of them just a few years ago.  It’s my life experience, the bitterness of my suffering, and the way I felt the Lord intervened in that, and then the desperation that drove me to scour the Bible for its every detail on marriage and find my redemption there, that changed my mind for me.  But I can understand how any man, any woman with a kind and loving husband, any single, would be utterly incapable of understanding my situation if they haven’t lived it and cried out to God with the desperation I have, and gotten the answer I got.  And while I don’t agree with them, and I don’t want to stand before them and let them sling mud, I do understand enough to stop judging them.  They are doing the best they can with what they’ve been given.  As am I.