September 1: Of Kipling, Hamlet, Job and Flight Thresholds

Job 40:1-42:17

2 Corinthians 5:11-21

Psalm 45:1-17

Proverbs 22:14

Today we get to the end of Job's story.  He finally gets the opportunity to face God, and it doesn't go the way he'd hoped.  He was looking for a reason, an explanation, some confirmation of his righteousness.  That is NOT what he got.  Instead, God reminds Job of who He is, and the only response Job can make, after all he said and cried and lamented, after all he suffered, is silence.  "I spoke once, but I have no answer - twice, but I will say no more." 

I am trying to imagine what Job must be thinking, must be feeling at this time.  A renewed realization of who he was and who God was, perhaps, coupled with a deep sense of remorse for his words?  Yet might that not have been caught in the mire of sadness for the loss of his family, anger and frustration at all he had suffered?  Perhaps sprinkled with a bit of relief that his long, excruciating suffering might finally be coming to an end, one way or another?  

People talk about the fight-or-flight response.  When faced with adversity, I think our first instinct is to resist.  At the point at which we conclude fight is futile, we flee. For the purposes of this blog, let's call that the flight threshold.  The "FT".

Different people have different FTs.  And different levels of adversity trigger different FT responses.  Where some might flee to a drink, others might finish the bottle.  Where one might take a pill to take the edge off of the pain, others might take ten and hope not to wake up.  

Where, as Kipling said, one might be able to "meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same", others might respond, like Hamlet did when faced with the certainty his mother had just so quickly married the uncle who'd killed his father, by asking "whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them."

Job faced adversity far greater than Hamlet.  Yet, while he'd ceased to fight, he never fled - not to the sin of cursing God, not to the act of ending a life he'd admitted he was better off never having lived.  When faced with difficulty far less than the loss of all one's children, of all one's worldly possessions, and of one's health, we should have so high an FT.  I'll be honest - I don't know that I do, and I hope never to have to find out.  

Father, when we struggle against adversity and near the end of our rope, come to us like You did Job, and remind us that You have Your reasons, and comfort us with that knowledge.