Text: Job 3:1-10
This may surprise most of you, but I have a daughter who is a bit dramatic. Kifer creates epic narratives that span generations, fully formed characters with fleshed out backstories, scoring the action with her own soundtrack – and all of this with a couple Lego men, a stuffed cat named ‘Cat,’ and a plastic fork. And while I love her creativity, she is also as likely to give you an interpretive dance of your words as is she is to actually obey them.
In her created worlds, she is both Queen and god. She very rarely lets anyone else contribute or change her plan or story. When I suggested one time that as merman I had one leg and one flipper, rather than her vision of three flippers, she went into a creative coma that threatened the entire production – an outburst that would have made Martin Scorsese proud. (Eventually, she came to me with a compromise: I could have one leg and two flippers. We agreed this would fit the story better. The show went on.)
Unfortunately, she often carries this unalterable vision of her story into the real world. A few days ago, as I awoke to a gentle tapping on the head, I saw her almost-five-year-old eyes beaming at my now-40-year-old face. It was almost-SIX-IN-THE-MORNING and I was now-very-much-irritated.
‘Dad! Good morning! I was thinking I want eggs!’ She thought she was speaking breakfast into existence, but her creative powers are less adorable to me before the sun can light her productions.
‘No. Not now. Later,’ was about all I could muster for a response.
At which point she stood up on the bed, lifted her hands to the sky, and yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘Ugh! I wish I had never been born!’
The Queen’s vision of how the world should work did not match her reality and it brought her whole existence into question.
Job had a much greater complaint than missing eggs for breakfast. He had lost everything: livelihood, family, and health. In fact, his entire world – even his marriage – had come crashing down on him.
I’m sure this is how Ki felt, and unjustified as she may have been, she and Job had the same response: ‘I wish I had never been born!’
And there are times in all of our lives when we feel this way, especially when our vision of how it should be and what actually is the case don’t match up in incredibly disappointing and even catastrophic ways. I think a lot of us have had this recently – and I think a lot of God’s people have felt this way over the millennia we have populated this planet.
And that’s exactly why a book like Job exists, canonized and codified as Scripture for us.
There’s a lot going on in Job – it’s one of the most dense and beautiful books in all of the Bible. But here, in Job 3, we get a glimpse of at least one of its many lessons: It is okay to complain to God! It’s even okay to be dramatic about it!
After my daughter’s cry for non-existence, I pulled her down from the top of the mountain and tickled her into joy once again. We then fell asleep and later had eggs at the reasonable-hour-for-breakfast of eight in the morning – and spent the rest of the day creating and populating the worlds of her imagination.
I can only imagine that’s God’s response to our complaints are even more loving and creative.