Week 31 – Face Flat on the Racetrack of Life
Job 21-25
Have you ever been to a track meet? I went to one today for our youngest son. They began this meet at 3:00 in the afternoon. That’s 15:00 hours if you’re a military man. I am not. But the gentlemen in front of me to my left served in the Marine Corp and he had both the hat and the t-shirt to prove it and I couldn’t see his watch but I bet it said 15:00 when that meet started. The meet ended at 22:35. That’s 10:35 for us non-military folks.
There is just so much running at a track meet. Really a lot. Fast runs they call dashes. Those are always short. 100 or 200 or 400 meters. Which if you aren’t a runner seems like a really long dash. Then there are the runs of 800 and 1600 meters. These crazy kids just run like nobody’s business. They look like Springboks on the Serengeti, lithe and sleek they churn their legs around that track. Some of them put hurdles on the track – on purpose – that they must, well, hurdle, as they run. It is extraordinary. My own son ran the 200 meter dash in socks because he is 13 and he thought it would be funny. And he won his heat. Because teenagers live in a crazy fantasy world where you win races in socked feet.
Not all the kids enjoyed their races. Hurdles are hard. A cruel teacher when you don’t get that back foot up enough. When you leap a hurdle, your entire body is suspended in the air. Gravity always wins, and when the back leg that is supposed to swing forward and catch your full weight gets hooked on a hurdle, well, you look like a Springbok who got caught by a lioness, crumpled on the ground in defeat. When that happens, the crowd starts clapping and cheering for the girl to get up and keep running. And she does. She gets up, churns those legs, and finishes the race. A lot of character gets built when you faceplant in the 300-meter hurdles.
In other events, some of the runners are simply exhausted. Red-faced jelly legged exhausted. I watched one kid finish and just lay down on the track. He was done. DONE. Too beat to care. But he finished his race. The last kid to cross the finish line still ran his race. Slower than the other kids? Yes. But there is a profound beauty in finishing what you started. A completeness. A goodness. And the crowd cheers that kid on because they see the beauty in the struggle. They see the person in the struggle, and that person matters. There is an immense human connection when a crowd of people cheer an exhausted human on so they can finish a race when they are utterly depleted.
Studying Job changes how I process events in my life. And when I see a kid fall over a hurdle, I wonder if Job’s friends would cheer for him to get up and keep going or if they would do what they did to Job – kick him while he’s down. Blame him for bad hurdling form. Attack his character while he lays akimbo on the track surface, breath knocked out, nostrils filled with the hot polyurethane stench of failure.
Job opens his latest retort in Chapter 21 by saying, “Bear with me that I may speak, then after I have spoken, you may mock me.” Let me just finish my sentence, complete a thought! Then have at me. Mock me. I don’t care. Just let me speak first. Job has stopped running. He’s laying face up in the middle of the track, the hurdle tumbled over on top of him. He is done. Exhausted. Defeated. And his friends, who have never run a race like Job’s, are jeering him from the stands.
We humans can get philosophical when we’re beat down. Job asks why the wicked seem to prosper even though his friends said that God always judges the wicked. Job points out that God seems to let wicked people do pretty well sometimes. And he is in good company – Asaph wrote Psalm 73 wrestling with this same problem. Eliphaz doesn’t like it. It doesn’t fit into his neat little box of how God works. So he states his flawed thesis: If you suffer, then you sinned, and suffering is your own darn fault. He even makes stuff up to prove his point, “you withheld bread from the hungry, failed to give the weary a drink of cold water and sent widows away empty handed.” Job never did any of this! But Eliphaz is so desperate to fit Job’s suffering into his black-and-white, everything in its neat little theological cubby hole, that he is willing to invent sin to accuse Job of so that he can feel good in the face of his unanswered questions. Sounds like what the Pharisees did to Jesus. They had no concept of who Christ was. Their narrow view of God didn’t allow it. So they go on the attack.
C.S. Lewis, in his beautiful haunting book, A Grief Observed, discusses how pain changes how we view God, ““My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.” We think we understand God until we’re lying face down on the track. Then all the things we thought we knew stop making sense and we are left only with pain and questions. Here is a reality people don’t like discussing: God uses suffering to shatter our ideas of who He is. He takes the pretty little theological houses we built out of sticks and glue and sets them on the ground and lets the weight of pain snap and crush our construct.
Job simply ignores his friends here and longs to just stand before God and ask Him what in the world is going on. Job has been righteous this whole time, “My foot has held fast to the path, I have kept His way and not turned aside”, and yet suffering has come. Job’s very life undercuts the theological argument of his friends. And Job is stuck. “Who can turn Him? What His soul desires, He does…I would be dismayed in His presence…I am terrified of Him.” Job’s heart is breaking against the immutable nature of God and the unbearable pain of his situation. He is between the gravity of his grief and the immovable track surface of God’s unchanging nature. Smashed flat with nowhere to go.
In response, he starts to point out that the wicked sometimes do terrible things and God doesn’t destroy them. It doesn’t make sense. But Job has the courage to see it and still seek the face of the God he doesn’t understand. He has the courage to let God shatter his ideas about God. That is what suffering does. It makes us see behind the veil of our own broken concepts of God. It forces us to do that because the pain cuts too deeply to ignore. And when we sit in our pain for long enough we get to the point where we stop caring about what every other person thinks and we just want to talk to God. We may be afraid of Him. We may even begin to hate Him. But we long for Him because He is the only one greater than the pain of our suffering.
All of us at one point find ourselves in the stadium. Either on the track or in the stands. We trip over hurdles of our own making. Or we execute a perfect jump and tear our ACL on the landing. Or we’re simply outrun. Sometimes we’re emptied, spent before the finish line we thought was closer. And sometimes it just isn’t even our fault: A stray water bottle skitters across our lane, unseen, and we’re down. Ankle sprained. Ragged breath replaces disciplined rhythm. The race goes on around us while we lie there stunned and losing in view of everyone.
If you are on the track – give yourself grace. This stretch is not the whole course. Cry out in pain. Ask God why. Scream at Him. The God who formed your voice is not threatened by it. He is teaching you who He is. Shattering your small, brittle ideas about Him and building something closer to His glorious reality. And no matter how it feels, He has not left you. But its ok to feel that way.
If you’re in the stands, don’t remain untouched. Feel their pain. Enter the ache until is presses into your ribs. Sometimes compassion can’t stay seated and you might even need to get up, clank down the bleachers, jump the fence, get on the track and kneel beside the fallen. Say little. Stay long. Let them rage. Let them weep. And when they are ready (not when you are!), help them to their feet. Bear their weight. Match their pace, and walk beside them as they limp to the finish line.
Everyone else, lift your voice. We have a great cloud of witnesses who have run the race, who know the burn and the breaking and still crossed the finish line. Join that mighty chorus. Call out: Keep going! Fix your eyes on Jesus! Help them look full in His wonderful face, even if it means they scream at Him. Let them see His impossible beauty through a veil of burning tears. He meets us in the crucible. Enter the sacred workshop of suffering and let Him work. He is building something beautiful. Something that lasts forever.
