Suffering

This weekend we are looking at suffering. Here is what I cam up with for my column this Sunday:

Suffering. Evil. Pain. Unfairness. Disease. Brokenness. They all exist. Children in Africa long for a meal that will make their hunger go away. Airplanes are hijacked and crashed into skyscrapers. Relationships go down the drain and people, including innocent people, suffer. People who do bad things are rewarded. Cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attacks, etc… all happen. People live with depression and are alone. All of us know these things.

And we ask the question, “Why?” You can’t blame anybody for asking that question. This was the question Job asked. The messenger came to Job’s door and told him that he lost all his livestock, all his money, and all his kids. Before he even had an opportunity to grieve he got so sick that he wished that not only his problems would go away, but that he would go away as well.

Job had a wife who wasn’t much help. She told Job to curse God and die. I guess she forgot about the part, “For better, for poorer, in sickness, and in health.” He had three friends who did their best to convince Job that all of this was his fault. Job spit out some of the most insightful words ever to come off the lips of a human: “Do we take only the good from God and not the bad” and “I know that my Redeemer lives and in the end he will stand upon the earth.” But, Job’s friends were wearing him down it looked like then were almost getting to him, but then God took over and had a few words to speak of His own. And comparing Job’s words to God’s words is kind of like comparing a writing assignment of a 2nd grade student to the poetry of Shakespeare:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Who kept the sea inside its boundaries as it burst from the womb? I said, ‘This far and no farther will you come. Here your proud waves must stop!’ Have you ever commanded the morning to appear and caused the dawn to rise in the east?

And God was just getting warmed up. When He was done speaking Job finally figured out who Job was and who God was. Job also figured out that “Why?” was no longer the question that needed to be asked. The new question was “Who?” Not: “Why will such things happen?” But: “Who will help me get through this?”

The who includes the people God puts on our path in the journey of life. It also includes God. God is with us in our days of health and strength and God cries with us when we cry, grieves with us when we grieve, holds us when we fear, and carries us when we have no strength of our own.

In Christ,

Craig

Training Update:

5:00 a.m. workout today...so I was up early. I met Nicole at the gym and we did the following:

1 hour cycling on a trainer.

1 hour on the treadmill

10 minutes easy running
15 minutes at marathon pace
3 minutes recovery
5 x 5 minutes at marathon pace with 30 seconds recovery between harder runs
5 minutes easy running