Relief (Job 1-3)

[Warning: heavy topics ahead. As you read, if you feel yourself becoming triggered or overwhelmed, please do not keep reading. If this brings up wounds in your life, please seek help from a trusted friend, mental health counselor, etc.]

Job: A View Into Trauma

For the next 15 months on Sundays, I will be reading through the wisdom books (Job-Ecclesiastes) and Song of Songs. I won’t read in any other place, but allow myself time to meditate on the passages. I hope to share this journey!

For me, my view of Job had largely been shaped by what I’d always heard about Job – that it was a book about God’s Sovereignty. Though this is true, there is way more to this book. God’s Scriptures are not shy about the human experience, and Job is no exception. Job is chronologically around the time of Abraham and Sarah or maybe even before the tower of Babel, meaning there’s no law, there’s no miraculous Exodus story, etc. At best, Job has the stories found in Genesis 1-11 through oral testimony passed down through the generations. When we read about Job and what he was like (“blameless and upright”), it’s pretty amazing given the fact he only knew a fraction of what we know today about God.

Though I will continue to value the lesson of God’s Sovereignty found in Job, I am also learning to value hearing the cry of someone in the chaos of trauma. I find it fascinating that God would inspire the writing of Job’s story and it would be SO LONG! I used to begrudge reading Job because I couldn’t understand why God wouldn’t shorten it to the main points. Why on earth do we have Job 3-37? Why do we have to listen to this back and forth between Job and his friends? Just get to the point already!

But God in His infinite wisdom chose to give us the extended version. God gave us an up close and personal view of someone’s lived experience in the throws of trauma. Stripped of everything – livelihood, children, and health – even his wife encouraged him to “Curse God and die.” There’s no doubt that Job is living through traumatic events. I am asking myself:

• What is the story Job is telling about what he is experiencing?
• What is the story he is telling himself about God?
• What is the story Job’s friends are telling about Job’s experience?
• What is the story Job’s friends are telling about God?

If I keep going on this train of thought, this will be a much longer post about my journey with Gospel and putting narrative back into our Gospel. But that is for another time. This is what God shared with me when I read Job 1-3.

Job 1-3: Relief

Job’s friends spent 7 days with him in silence because “they saw that his suffering was very great” (Job 2:13). They wept with him and cried out with him. They merely offered their presence as they joined him in his weeping. When someone is in the midst of trauma, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. Survival is all that matters in those moments. The brain does not distinguish between emotional trauma and physical trauma; trauma is trauma and the brain enters survival mode. When the prefrontal cortex shuts down, it’s nearly impossible to put words together to form logical sentences. It’s extremely difficult to put words together at all!

So when Job spoke after 7 days, what is the first thing he says to explain what he is experiencing? He says he wishes he had died at birth. But let’s look deeper. He references something three times (and two allusions to the same):

11 “Why did I not die at birth, come out from the womb and expire? . . . 13 For then I would have lain down and been quiet; I would have slept; then I would have been at rest . . . 16 Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child, as infants who never see the light? 17 There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. 18 There the prisoners are at ease. . . 25 For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. 26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, but trouble comes.”

REST. Job, exacerbated by the constant battering of calamity in his life, longs for rest. It’s as if he’s saying, “I just need it to STOP! I need some RELIEF!” He longs to find relief from the chaos.

Job, not able to see any light, concludes that the only way he could find relief from his suffering is if he had never been born alive in the first place. He concludes that relief is found in the next life, but not in the land of the living. He gives clues to the story he is telling himself about God – that he is cruel; that he gives life, but then that life is full of misery. Job ends his first speaking moment with saying that though he longs for relief, only trouble comes.

This is someone in trauma: Overloaded. Bombarded. Surging with survival hormones and chemicals in the brain and throughout the body. Unable to think about anything else other than the longing for relief. This is a normal response to trauma.

This is the beginning of Job telling his story and the story he is telling himself about God.

We know the end of the story, so that is comforting. But we as Westerners (and Job’s friends), struggle with sitting with someone in their pain. It’s uncomfortable. But let us learn the complexities of trauma, how trauma impacts someone, and so grow in our capacity to be empathetic comforters. Let us also grow in empathy towards ourselves when we experience trauma or even gain the courage to perhaps face (maybe for the first time) old gaping wounds in the presence of empathic, safe listeners.