As part of a book project, I once interviewed the person I knew whose life most resembled Job’s. I met this man, Douglas, at a restaurant for breakfast.
Douglas seemed “righteous” in the same sense as Job: not perfect, of course, but a model of Christian faithfulness. He had declined a lucrative career in psychotherapy in favor of starting an urban ministry.
Douglas’s time of troubles had begun about seven years before. His wife, who had already lost one breast to cancer, discovered a new lump, and then doctors found that the cancer had spread to her lungs.
Just as Douglas’s family was absorbing that ominous news, they were dealt another blow. A drunk driver swerved across the center line and smashed into their car head-on. Douglas’s wife was badly shaken, but unhurt. His 12-year-old daughter suffered a broken arm and severe facial cuts from windshield glass. Douglas himself had the worst injury, a massive blow to the head.
After the accident, Douglas never knew when an incapacitating headache might strike. He could not work a full day, and sometimes at the office he would become disoriented and forgetful. Worse, the accident permanently affected his vision. One eye wandered at will, refusing to focus. He saw everything double, and could hardly walk down a flight of stairs without assistance. Douglas learned to cope with all his disabilities but one: he could not read more than a page or two at a time.
When I met Douglas for breakfast, I braced myself for a difficult morning. If anyone had a right to be angry at God, he did. I explained the basic thrust of my book, and asked about his experience of disappointment with God. What had he learned that might help someone else going through a difficult time?
Douglas was silent for what seemed like a long time. He gazed off beyond my right shoulder, and I fleetingly wondered if he was having a mental “gap.” Finally, he said this: “To tell you the truth, Philip, I didn’t feel any disappointment with God.”
I was startled. Douglas, searingly honest, had always rejected easy formulas for life or faith. And yet his response sounded like one of the “Turn your scars into stars!” testimonials I had heard on religious television. I kept quiet, waiting for him to explain.
“The reason is this. I learned, first through my wife’s illness and then especially through the accident, not to confuse God with life. I’m no stoic. I am as upset about what happened to me as anyone could be. I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger. But I believe God feels the same way about that accident—grieved and angry.”
Douglas continued, “I have learned to separate the physical reality in this world from the spiritual reality. We tend to think, ‘Life should be fair because God is fair.’ But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life—by expecting constant good health, for example—then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment.”
For the next hour, Douglas and I worked through the Bible together, testing out his notion of the separateness of “physical reality” and “spiritual reality.” Most heroes of the Old Testament (Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, and Daniel) went through trials much like Job’s. For each of them, at times, the physical reality surely seemed to present God as “the enemy.” But each managed to cling to God despite the hardships of daily life.
“If we can have a relationship with God apart from the physical reality of our life circumstances,” said Douglas, “then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. Isn’t that, after all, the main point of Job?”
We talked on, until Douglas realized he was already late for another appointment. He put his coat on hurriedly and stood up to leave. Then he leaned forward with one last thought. “I challenge you to go home and read again the story of Jesus. How ‘fair’ was life to him? For me, the Cross demolished for all time the basic belief that life is supposed to be fair.”
Douglas’s stark separation of the physical and the spiritual troubles me, since both are part of God’s creation, but his idea about the unfairness of life has stayed with me. I find myself meditating on it every year about this time, just before Good Friday.
Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there and its human rights abuses. Local police took their revenge by arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death.
Townsfolk, enraged, wanted to turn the boy’s funeral into a huge protest march. But the doctor chose another means of protest. Rather than dressing his son for the funeral, the father displayed him in the church as he had found him in the jail. The son was naked, his body marked with scars from the electric shocks and cigarette burns and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the town jail. It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display.
Isn’t that what happened on Good Friday? The Cross exposed the world for what it is: a breeding ground of violence and injustice. And that dark Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday.
Good Friday demolishes the instinctive belief that this life is supposed to be fair. But Easter Sunday gives a bright and startling clue to the riddle of the universe. Someday, God will restore the physical reality of planet Earth to its proper place under his reign. The miracle of Easter will be enlarged to cosmic scale. It is a good thing to remember, when disappointment with God hits, that we live out our days on Easter Saturday.
