Today Kate is a guest writer on the Christians for Biblical Equality blog…
Job has always been one of my favorite books of the Bible. When I was a teenager my family went through a very difficult time. While going through the heartache of losing my grandfather to cancer, my father was diagnosed with it. I was attending a Christian school at the time and my Bible class was going through the wisdom literature texts. During this time of loss and struggle, the book of Job spoke to me in ways that it never had before. On a very small scale, I identified with the loss that Job had gone through. I struggled through questions similar to his, and I tried to build my faith on the wisdom from that book. By the grace of God my father lived, but we still mourned the loss of my grandfather. Job 1:21 was my struggle and has been my life verse ever since: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The book of Job has helped me through difficult times and has given me truth to stand on when sorrow blurred my vision of God’s goodness. I understand why the Church holds up the book of Job as the example of faith in the midst of pain and suffering and, until recently, I agreed with the conventional idea that ‘nobody knows pain like Job’.
Then I went to my small group and a friend said something that reached to the core of me. He talked about women who are victims of sex trafficking; Women who are kidnapped, beaten, enslaved; Women who might never fully recover from what they have gone through. My friend asked about God’s goodness in the darkest of situations, and when someone mentioned Job, he pointed out that everything in the book of Job got tied up in a nice bow at the end. Then he said, “What about them? Job’s got nothing on them”.
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