Life is worth living!

Scriptural Reflection
Tuesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time
28 September 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Center

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Job is mad. He is spent. Not just a little bit. His life is a living hell. He wants to die. He can't imagine things getting any worse. He just wants it to be over.

This is more than just getting up on the wrong side of the bed. This is more than just having a bad day. Job has passed the point where the good in life outweighs the bad. Usually our lives are a mixture of both, with even on our worst days the good far outweighing the bad. Job is past that point. Way past it. He can no longer see any good. He can no longer experience any good. He has reached the point where life no longer seems worth living.

Yet the great story of Job is Job's deciding not to curse God. He does not blame God. He does not lose faith. He does not forget that his life is a gift, and he is not the author of his life. He does not forget the goodness of his entire life, just because the present is bad. Job does not let his own expectations of what life owes him to cause him to doubt God. Even though he wishes God would take this cup of suffering away, he does not take the occasion to curse God. The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Even though in his present moment Job's experiences nothing good, still he does not let the agony of the moment cancel out the good he has experienced in life. Life at the moment is not worth living for him, but life as a whole was worth living, and so even though he welcomes death, it is not because he has lost faith in God's goodness. Just because he cannot feel it right now does not make Job forget that God is good.

Job is a great model for those of us whose faith seems to wane when things don't go our way. It is ok to expect things to go well. It is ok to plan and to work to receive God's blessings and to make them fruitful. It is not ok to expect things to go our way. It is not faith if it wanes as soon as we do not get what we want. True faith is not only strong when things are good, it flourishes and shows itself to be pure and undefiled when it grows stronger in the face of every difficulty.