Today's passage is Job 2.
At another angel meeting the Lord brags about Job maintaining his faith. Satan challenges God to let Job be physically hurt. God agrees and Satan afflicts Job with horrible boils all over his body. When Job's wife says to curse God, Job says we have to accept the good and bad from God. Three of Job's friends show up to comfort him but they day nothing for a week, just sit with him.
In Job's trials, it seems as if everyone is being tested, Satan for thinking faith is conditional on wealth and good health, Job's wife for lack of resilience, and Job's friends for lack of empathy, for not being able to reach out with a few words of encouragement and validation.
Just like Satan, Job's wife and Job's friends, I'm not good at encouraging others. I get angry. I'm impatient. I aim for perfection in myself and others. For most of my life I didn't see this as a problem. Now I do.
Here's what I have learned about this since God sent me to Wooridle. It's very simple, so it took a long time to learn it.
I get angry at myself and others, demanding perfection, because I'm depressed.
I'm depressed because my self-esteem is low. How can I encourage others, validate them and their behavior and actions and help them with their sefl-esteem when I have very little myself? The answer, of course, is that I can't.
Satan, Job's wife, and Job's friends all have low self-esteem.
They aren't balanced individuals, they have no resilience.
Failures--big and small--unnerve them and unbalance them.
Job has to tell his wife what she should have said to him! He has resilence because he's balanced.
In the midst of suffering, she should have said to Job: "God is bigger than we can understand. We once had everything and now we have nothing but God is still the same." Instead, in anger and despair, she says, "Curse God and die!"
She doesn't encourage Job because she can't. She's operating from a centre of depression.
Job's friends are the same. Silence does not encourage anyone who has lost all his wealth and is now afflicted with a painful disease.
Validating him as an unshakeable believer in God, trusting in him and utterly dependent on him for his daily bread and breath was what his friends needed to say.
But they sit silently for a week!
How well do I do with my children, my teachers, my students, my wife, my mogwons? Not well at all.
I'm too busy being angry that I'm not meeting my standards.
And I'm angry at others for getting in the way of my meeting my standards.
Me, me, me.
I don't practice empathy very much.
I don't help others towards better balance in their lives. Instead, I add to their problems.
Jesus said I should have a millstone around my neck and be thrown into the sea because I have harmed children.
And the way I have harmed them is by my anger and my assaulting their self-esteem instead of building them up.
They can't learn if they feel frightened and worthless.
No one's born with self-esteem.
We learn it at home and at school pre-eminently. I'm an educator.
Tearing down students instead of helping to build them up has been my greatest sin.
I live in a country where there are 40 suicides a day, the world's highest rate.
I have seriously depressed students in my school.
How am I validating them as individuals?
How am I showing the unconditional love and acceptance they don't get from parents who continually compare them to others?
How am I being like Satan, Job's wife, and Job's friends?
I do it by not praying to find the words and actions to help the troubled people around me become less troubled.
When my wife asks me why I love her, do I say she's pretty, smart, sexy, caring, self-sacrificing? No.
Although those are some of her characteristics, I love her because she's who she is.
God put her in my life to love. There is no condition on that.
Satan is trying to put conditions on Job's love for God.
But there are none.
Job loves God because he's God. It's unconditional.
Lord, let me not just accept others in their situations but help me encourage them, validate them for who they are and what they're doing. I pray you take away my anger, take away my desire to be perfect and make me free to love those people you have brought into my life. Help me be balanced so I can help others. Amen.
