Starting Again
Trip Start
Feb 08, 2009
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31
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Trip End
Jul 04, 2010
Sydney, Australia
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
In other news, I am back in Sydney for a few days, having escaped from Lismore and Grafton before they flooded. I got a letter from the child in Brazil that I sponsor, and he has asked me to go and visit him, so I am making a vague and suspicious attempt at learning to speak Portuguese.
I have a new second-favourite novel called Acheron, which is all about a guy who spends his life in slavery (My favourite novel being Dark Desire, which is about a guy who was tortured for 7 years...). And finally, I have just finished reading Job (a book in the Bible in which God and Satan have a bet about how humans behave, and a poor guy called Job gets to suffer horrifically for it, then gets smartly reprimanded for asking God why he does not deliver justice to people), and now I am wondering what to do with my life when we seem to have a choice between serving a God who will casually inflict immense suffering on us for the length of our natural lives, or going to hell. Hmm, what a choice...
Comments
Interpreting Job
Laura, I have to comment on your entry re Job.
It comes down to having the correct understanding of what actually was happening in Job. God reprimanded him in the end, not for asking the question so much, but for trying to reason with God using human understanding. For Job (or anyone) to try to figure out God's justice with our own heads is setting ourselves up as being as smart as or smarter than God.
That's why God asks him: where were you when the earth and stars were set in place and whether Job can measure the universe, whether he can seek out the depths of the ocean, etc. God's motive through this testing is not to casually inflict immense suffering, but to grow Job's understanding and faith. Ultimately, it was for relationship - and anyway, it was Satan doing the inflicting, and you can't just read one book in the Bible and say that you now understand who God is. The whole thing must be read in context - the whole thing is the story of God's incredible love for us and the journey we are all on together from Creation until the End and the New Beginning.
I don't know if this helps, it's a difficult book to understand.
For me personally, I know that we were never promised a trouble free life. The book of James helps us out with understanding the place of trouble and hardship in our lives, and I love that this life is not about a destination so much as a journey. How we handle the troubles and trials day by day IS the destination as well as the journey. Good luck with your journey!