Wondering in Job....

(posting on Wondering Wednesdays thoughts from my 2014 Bible Read-Thru)

 Photo from flickr.com - Vilhjálmur Páll Bjarnason

A few years ago, the Lord took me through a season of grieving and worshiping.  When devastation comes to your life, there also comes a time of testing whether you will receive it from the Lord and trust Him more or whether you will grow bitter.  Sometimes, people don't understand their circumstances and decide they are done with God.  Other times, people might just try to pretend that nothing bad happened because to do so would show a lack of faith.  I came to a place where I learned that I needed to both grieve and worship.  I needed to identify something that I had lost and which made me sad and in the next breathe I needed to identify something that I could be thankful for.  I need not ignore the pain that the Lord was bringing me through, but I didn't need to focus only on it either.  Embracing both was one of the keys to my healing. 

So it was very interesting to me in this reading of Job to notice that Job did the same thing.  He didn't try to deny that what he went through was painful, but he also worshiped God in the midst of it.  He knew that God would see him through.  Job is in a place where he cannot perceive God but yet he remains confident in Him and confident that God sees him and his ways.  In the same breath Job declares his confidence in God and that God is the One who has stripped everything away.  He holds tightly to his integrity while he authentically grieves and is in pain. 

I think it is important to hold both - grieving and worshiping - in our hands and hearts.  We live in a truly broken world and our hearts break for it.  At the same time, our ever-present God is with us and blesses us way beyond what we deserve and even beyond what most of us realize in our daily lives. 

Maybe you will take some time today to acknowledge what you may be grieving instead of hiding it somewhere under the pretense of "having faith". 

Maybe after that, you will try to open your eyes to blessings that are hiding right out there in the open.