To every life comes a time of sackcloth and ashes, for who has fully escaped those catastrophes that send their torments into our deepest chambers of being? And when life’s walking-wounded level their white-hot accusations against the Living God for His silent dereliction of duty, how often we are cut to the quick because what passes as our theology flees before an accuser’s inconsolable tears. Indeed, for every shattered, grieving soul, there was once a vibrant personality that flowered only to wither in a hellish time of boils, cancers, and duress. Notwithstanding, it is here in our sufferings that the white noise of the planet dissipates under the roar of our own groaning. It is here that the dialogue that contends with that haunting “why” can fully begin. The Book of Job is about many things, but above all it exists as an open-ended vivisection of why good people suffer. It is as poignant now as when it was composed in a time opaque to the appeals of...(Read Full Article)