Day 78 - When No Explanation Is Needed
📖Daily Reading
Job 1-2
🎥 Video
Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.
📝 Reflection
Job 2: 3
Then the Lord asked Satan, “have you noticed my servant Job? He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless- a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil. And he had maintained his integrity, even though you urged me to harm him without cause.”
Job is a heavy book attempting explain the unexplainable and to also reassure us that sometimes no explanations are needed. In Job we are taken up to the heavens into a scene of the heavenly court where members presented themselves to the Lord along with Satan ‘the accuser’. Satan accuses God basically of playing favorites with Job and presents a plan to test Job’s true heart by asking God to allow him to take everything away from him and ‘then we will see how blameless he really is, I bet he will curse you then’. God agrees to the plan, he has faith in Job’s integrity and allows it to be put to the test.
Now what human would ‘get’ this explanation? I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of God using me in a bet against Satan. Well I don’t nee to worry about that, I would not be a candidate for this testing - I am no where near blameless. The overall message I got from reading the first half of Job is that I am just a ‘speck’ of a human, who do I think I am that I need an explanation? I may want one, but do I need one? Sometimes I really think I do. Our brains are ‘meaning making’ machines, because we need to file and organize our experiences in a way that makes sense so that we can move on. But sometimes there is no explanation and spending time and energy trying to make sense of things can be the thing that keeps us stuck.
Sometimes we can learn to just be with our experiences even when it is painful and we or others are suffering. Sometimes the best thing we can do is to just feel it and acknowledge it. This is no fun, but sometimes necessary. If we don’t deal with things they will deal with us. Sometimes we are not the one suffering but we have the opportunity to come along side someone who is suffering or must bear the burden of being in the midst of suffering. This is hard stuff. At the time of writing this, we are just coming out of a world wide pandemic, political turmoil, wars, catastrophic weather events. We are surrounded by suffering and thing not making much sense. We often just want to ‘fix’ things and make things better. In this we can rush the process and cause more suffering long term and damage relationships.
Job has everything taken away from him; his possessions, his animals, his livelihood, his children and even his wife turns her back on him, and then even his health is taken. His friends hear about this devastating news and come to comfort their friend. At first they just sit with him in silence, which is good, but then they can’t take it anymore. They jump in and starting trying to fix and explain. It is hard to be in midst of suffering and pain. I am a ‘fixer’ and a ‘helper’ by nature. As I explore my motivations and am trying to grow towards integration which requires self awareness and honestly, I must admit that this need to ‘fix’ and explain is often for my own comfort disguised as help. I don’t like admitting it, but it is true. What if I just allowed suffering without trying so hard to always ‘fix’ it? Now I am speaking here about just situationally when in the presence of a friend or loved one as Job and his friends. Obviously if we had a skill set that allowed us to actually do something tangible to relieve another’s suffering then that is a different scenario.
Going back to the story and also back to the psychology of the selves, I can imagine the conversation between Job and his friends that is one that also takes place within ourselves as well. One part of us is truly suffering and another part of us feeling guilt or shame for acknowledging our suffering and complaining. I really struggle with this, and it is a really hard thing to change and to even be self aware when I am doing it. Those of us that are natural helpers and fixers are often also the worst to ourselves, in our own pride we stuff down our own needs and feelings. Then we can find our selves with some bad habits as a way to deal with what we aren’t willing to deal with. This is what we mean when we say that what you ‘resist persists’ and ‘what you don’t deal with will deal with you’, ‘what you don’t heal you repeat’ etc..
Maybe Job in his suffering was still demonstrating exactly what God knew to be true about him, he was a man with complete integrity. He integrated his suffering, he didn’t deny it and he didn’t shift the blame to God, he didn’t bow to agreement with his friends for their comfort, he also didn’t need an explanation from God. He was facing his reality, this doesn’t mean we have to like it or even pretend like we do. This is good lesson for me personally. One I will have to sit with and grow into. I fall into dualistic thinking in this area of allowing all the feelings and needing an explanation.
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
How about you? Do you find yourself always needing an explanation and trying to ‘fix’ yourself and others?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Job 3-29
Coaching Opportunity
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