As a gardener, I work in all kinds of weather. Rain, sun, and wind—both light and strong. In the extremes, I find myself tempted to complain:
* The furnace of summer heat can quickly become too much to bear.
* The torrents of winter rain can stop me completely in my tracks.
* The dangerous, howling winds can blow so hard it puts safety at risk.
Yet, I know deep down that all this weather brings a necessary balance of both good and bad. In the summer, I long for the rain to water the earth and wash the dust off the trees. In the winter, I long for the sun to warm me and the soil. Lightning charges the rain with nitrogen to bless the earth below, while the wind keeps the flow of life from turning stagnant.
As I walk the gardens, my mood’s pendulum frequently swings from thankfulness to grumbling. Throughout this rhythm, I have to mindfully remind myself that God is fundamentally good. We have an eternal God who desperately wants to help us navigate this broken, mixed-up world.
Can You Accept Both Good from God and Trouble?
It is remarkably easy to accept the good. We love the days when everything is going well, the sun is shining, you’ve slept soundly, and you know you have beauty and purpose.
But what about when the clouds are dark? What happens when tiredness and pain surround the heart, and you feel ugly, defeated, and ready to hide away?
True acceptance is something we must slowly grow ourselves into.
Shall We Accept Good from God and Not Trouble?
In this series, we are diving into one of the most mysterious and traumatic books of the Bible—the book of Job.
Our kindred human friend sits alone on an ash heap, picking at his painful sores. He has just been assailed by his wife for his faithful commitment to God, and she wants him to walk away from his faith entirely.
Job speaks his response directly:
We have to unpack the weight of this verse.
When Job says, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak,” he is noting that she lacks the foundational knowledge to make such massive declarations. She does not have the depth of wisdom from which to draw to help in this traumatic situation.
Then, he asks a poignant question. Questions have a unique way of opening up the inner self to explore further. They can be deeply challenging, but sometimes hard questions need to be asked—questions that take us right into mystery and confusion. The book of Job and Job himself are full of such questions.
Words matter deeply here. Let’s look at the original language:
* Receive (qabal): To deliberately accept or take into oneself.
* Good (towb): Benefits, welfare, and blessings.
* Bad (ra’): Adversity, calamity, and trouble.
Shall we receive into ourselves only the benefits without also holding the adversities?
Currently, I am pruning roses. It’s winter, and they are dormant, but I know with certainty that spring is coming and new buds will soon be pushing through. I am pruning tightly, I am being harsh, and there is clear adversity for the plant—but I hold a compelling vision of beauty and purpose coming to greet me in four months. The trouble actively produces the benefits.
I, too, am a rose bush. I endure the rain, cold, drought, and storms. But I also receive warmth, water, sunlight, and affirmations. Out of this raw mixture of blessing and adversity comes a profound depth of knowing. It is a knowing that can ultimately bless both others and me.
Learning to Know
We naturally want the benefits. We still know deep within ourselves, somewhere encoded in our DNA, the ancient memory of “walking in the cool of the day” with God.
We crave tasting perfection in all things. We still remember it, but we are no longer there. We now live in a mixture of the harshness of living outside the garden and the sweet scent of beautiful roses.
Acceptance of our situation grows by going deep into knowing God rather than demanding God’s blessings and the immediate removal of adversities.
I mindfully swing my pendulum of conscious focus back into sitting at the feet of Jesus, being still and silent. I want to know God more than I want God’s blessings and relief from adversity. This is exactly what we find by the end of the Book of Job; he is brought to a far more profound, firsthand knowledge of God.
God wants us to be entirely open and honest with them about all areas of our lives:
1. Being genuinely thankful for the benefits.
2. Being deeply grateful that we are not left alone in times of adversity.
3. Understanding that acceptance grows with knowing we are fully accepted by God, no matter where the pendulum of life swings.
What Are You Velcro Clinging To?
What is your default focus when life gets difficult—the benefits or the adversity?
Our brains have a natural, evolutionary habit of clinging like Velcro to negative experiences while being like Teflon to the positive. Author Rick Hanson writes this:
I want to intentionally train my brain to velcro cling to the goodness of God. In those inevitable times of adversity, I want to be held tightly to God’s love for me.
So to answer the question—Shall we accept good from God and not trouble? Yes, we will.
Quotes to Consider
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“All of life is a mixture of joy and sorrow, and we must accept both together. (But one is not a punishment or reward for the other. This is crucial.) In the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, this becomes very dramatized, personalized, and correctly imaged. Both come together, and we can’t have one without the other. There has been a great temptation in many modern religious movements — like some in the charismatic movement or the ‘gospel of success’ — to have the resurrection without the cross, to enjoy part of the mystery, and to avoid the pain that necessarily goes with it.” — Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering
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“Worthwhile joy has pain stain. True joy is not authentic unless achieved through pain — not under it, not to the right or left or over, but through it. That’s the only authentic Christian joy. Any other joy is a covering up of pain, an escaping and denying. There is much denial in religion. The old ostrich maneuver — pretend it’s not happening. That’s not what the Lord is calling us to; it’s not the whole paschal mystery.” — Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering
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“Compassion means entering the suffering of another in order to lead the way out.” — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
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“When you stand before Me [God] in mystery, you will eventually rest within Me in trust. When you can’t figure Me out, you will give up the illusion of predictability and control and discover the joy of freedom and hope.” — Larry Crabb
Questions to Answer
1. Questions are there to open us up. How do you personally respond to Job’s question: Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?
2. Pruning roses, extremes of weather… which seasonal picture spoke to your current life circumstances the most?
3. The mood pendulum naturally swings. How can we practically keep it centered on knowing God in both the extremes of blessing and adversity?
Further Reading
- From One Thousand Gifts to Three Thousand Gifts and Counting
- When They Say Curse God and Die
- Is the Load Too Heavy? Watch With Me
Barry Pearman
Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash
