Today's passage is Job 14.
Job continues his one way talk to God. Since man lives such a short and hard life, he says, why doesn't God just leave him alone? When a man dies, that's it, unlike a cut down tree, which can sprout again. Job says he wants to be hidden in a grave until God's anger passes. He will wait for his renewal when God finally answers him. Then his sins will be remembered no more, but meanwhile all is hardship, pain and mourning.
Although Job paints a dismal picture of life, he has hope for justification of his complaint about unfair treatment. Job does not stop talking to God.
He doesn't give up his search for God because God is the only one who can give him the answer he seeks.
Job refuses to curse God and die.
Instead, he uses his circumstances to reflect on life, reflect on God, and demand an answer to his predicament.
Unlike Job, I gave up on God after years of getting no answer, at least the answer I wanted or was prepared to accept.
I wanted my fantasy life of new wife, new family, and restored career in Carolina back. Living alone in Siheung and helping to make the first English Village was a far cry from what I had had four years earlier.
It was better than living alone at the YMCA with no job, but not what I wanted, not what I felt I deserved.
Unlike Job, I stopped fighting God, at least for a while.
I just didn't have the energy to keep it up.
God didn't give up on me, though. He sent me the gentlest messenger in the world, a co-worker with seemingly unshakeable faith who thought my faith was leagues beyond his!
This young man was often the butt of other teachers' jokes because of his integrity of faith.
But every day with his gentle voice and manner he would engage me in God's word.
I had stopped reading the Bible myself, so he became the Word.
I didn't realize what was going on.
No surprise there because my major is being blind.
This man became my friend. We met mostly at work because he had a long commute from Seoul to Daebudo in Siheung.
He lived a hard life but never once did I hear him complain. I was the complainer.
I didn't start arguing with God again until I met my wife and heard the Lord's call to love her.
Between my giving up on God and then his re-entry into my life through my wife, my gentle friend 김기영 was God's answer to my years of angry, despairing complaint.
I just never saw it until right now, today.
Job didn't see God in his friends' rebuking of him either, as Pastor Kim pointed out.
There's a certain blindness to reality when you're full of complaint.
I'm an ongoing testimony to that. Blindness is my major.
Lord, let me not be blind and deaf to you. Let me not insist that your revelation must come in the way I say it should. Make me a balanced man, I pray, for I've failed to do it on my own these past 63 years. My hope is that your work in me will make me who I need to be for your glory.
