Today's passage is Job10.
Because he hates his life, Job says he will complain without restraint. He rails against God for oppressing him. He insults God by questioning whether he's mortal because of his human-like pursuit of his faults.
He cries out against his creator God for appearing to destroy him. He wishes he had died at birth. He thinks he's about to die and wants God to turn away from him just for a moment so he can feel joy before he dies and goes into eternal night.
Job touches on something vital to our humanity, something I didn't understand until I was full of the pain of suffering.
Pain gives you rights, the most important one being the right to complain deeply, loudly and accusingly with complete abandonment, with complete and utter freedom.
Jesus did it on the cross. "God, God, why have you abandoned me?" Jesus is fully human in his pain and his freedom to cry out in accusing complaint.
I've heard a lot of sermons on the crucifixion but I don't remember a single one addressing the issue of maximum pain and its paradoxical freedom.
Pain destroys niceness.
There's no point in trying to be nice and remembering to follow the rules of social behavior and not swear and spit and viciously accuse your torturer of inhumanity when it doesn't do a thing to relieve the pain.
It's perfectly reasonable to wish you were dead and wish you'd never been born.
Pain obliterates morality.
Ending the pain is all that matters. Pain frees you.
That's why suffering is the blessing.
When I was in pain I was free from pride, free from the desire for wealth, power and status.
Eventually I was freed from the desire for happiness that I had decided was a wife, children, house, career. That was the desire that had got me into so much pain in the first place, that and not seeing myself with any objectivity whatsoever.
By seeing myself objectively, I don't mean the superficial silliness of listing my strengths and weaknesses. I mean seeing myself as a sinful, sinning creature smitten with the blind pride that denied the reality of my thoughts, actions and very being.
Pain humbled me, reduced me to a mouthful of complaints, just like Job.
Just like Job, I said that if pain was all I got for believing in God, then I wanted God to go away and take my faith with him.
Pain freed me from the pretence of being noble, good, caring, optimistic, brave, persevering and self-controlled.
Pain reduced me to a complaint.
And in that empty freedom, God once again entered my life.
What had happened since my conversion in my late 20s was that the joy of faith, of having a living Lord and his Spirit got dampened by a failure to repent, to keep checking on my spiritual condition.
I became cluttered, my life purpose and focus lost in the bric-a-brac of a busy and aspiring life.
Pain smashed that. I didn't sit on an ashheap like Job.
I didn't have a horrible skin disease.
I didn't scrape my boils with broken pieces of pottery.
Not literally. But that image of Job is what extreme suffering reduced me to.
I wish I could say I haven't complained since God rescued me, but I have complained and whined and felt shame when I heard myself doing it.
Being in the hospital and reading Job helps me see myself better than before.
It helps me see that once I had the right to complain but that day is over.
I've been freed to praise God not complain about him by bitching about the circumstances of my easy life now.
Thankfully, I see what I have to repent of.
Lord, let me praise you for your mercy, giving me the smallest of broken knees to slow me down to see I am walking a path of complaining. I have been bitter about the Korean Ministry of Education and its negative policies that threaten the growth of my school. Lead me to right repentance and to right focus on your goals for my school. Let me love, accept and help my brother in law, not complain about what is obvious to all. Let me return to the time of joy when I first believed.
