Fist-Shaking Job and Me

Throughout this whole journey, I have been so quick to turn proud and bitter. I want this job, I believe I am qualified for this job, everything about my life feels like I should have this job.

I was on a walk with Kate and started to explain to her my thinking: "I just wish God knew..."

I stopped in my tracks. 

I wish God knew? The omniscient, all-seeing star breather who hems me in behind and before and holds the sum total of my very hairs in his hand? Did I really just attempt to claim that there is something God does not know?

And I realized that has been my entire mindset throughout this whole process. I have been proud, thinking my way is best, trying to force my will upon God's. I've been treating life like an emergency where it is up to me to get my plans to God just in time or else my entire future will fall apart. There has not been a single moment where I have slowed down enough to ask God what his will for my life is. There has not even been a time where I have bowed my will to his. 

I have been endlessly striving, behaving well so that he will give me this. Trying to tell him that everything else I've ever gotten doesn't really matter - I'll give it up - I just want this. 

Mags asked me yesterday, innocently, but with conviction, "so...what again is the worst case scenario here?"

I actually couldn't think of anything. Joe was going to get a job. We would have a paycheck. The crisis would not be financial. Would it be social? Was I so worried that Joe would have a tight-knit community that I wouldn't be a part of? That was equally irrational - we were going to be married. There was no worst-case scenario. No matter what happened, I was going to be okay.

I had made such an idol out of Westfield (thanks, Mom, for pointing that one out) that I was totally unwilling to compromise any other idea, even if it was an idea that God ordained before my first breath. I wanted WHS and nothing less. It was turning me into a monster.

In my Contemporary Christian Belief class, my final Gen. Ed. of TU, we've been talking about suffering. There is no person more familiar with suffering than Job. There is a brutally honest moment in chapter 31 where Job is sitting on his dung heap, scratching at his boils with a pottery shard, and he starts to shake his fist at Heaven.

"Is it not ruin for the wicked,
    disaster for those who do wrong?
4 Does he not see my ways
    and count my every step?"

Basically what he's saying throughout the entire chapter is, "God, don't you know that these things happen to people who are SINFUL? I am blameless! If I've done anything wrong, sure, I'll take this. But I have lived uprightly. I deserve none of this!" 

And we know from Scripture that Job was quite right. He had lived uprightly. His error comes in when he begins to look at God and say, "don't you know as well as I know? Don't you know I deserve none of this?"

Which is what I have been doing day after day after day. I am shaking my fist at God, trying to get him to see that I shouldn't have to suffer like this. That I deserve the job. That my future would be better suited for Kingdom impact if he would just let me have my way.

It's the most dangerous place I could be in. And it has been causing me to not only minimize God, but to let my dung heap become my reality. It is this very fist-shaking that attempts to position myself in the driver's seat, which is why I feel so anxious when it seems like things are not going my way.

What would it look like for this shaking fist to open into hands of surrender? Hands that say "thy will be done" and mean it? Hands that stop trying to manipulate the loving master of the Universe into conforming to my desires? 

I'm ready to give it a try.

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