Sitting with Job: Conversations among the Broken Pieces

So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, 

and inflicted loathsome sores on Job 

from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 

Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, 

and sat among the ashes. 

Job 2:7-8

A feeling of uncertainty settles in my gut as I walked up to a dirty, unkempt man sitting on the ground with some pottery shards scattered around him. 

Job…Job…

Yeah…

Hi. I’m here…well, I’ve come to sit with you. 

Welcome. Sit down. 

Ummm it looks kind of dirty down there.

Yes.

Couldn't we sit on the pillows over there? Or at least sweep the floor?

What’s in the bag?

Oh, it’s nothing.

It doesn’t look like nothing. It looks heavy.

It’s just my broken pieces. 

Your broken pieces?

Yeah. I broke the other day. It all became too much, and I broke. 

I have some experience with that. 

Yes, I know. That’s why I came to sit with you. 

Then, sit down. And empty out your bag. As you can see, we have plenty of broken pieces lying around here. 

I’d rather not. I’ll just keep holding them in this bag until I figure out how to put them back together. I can just put them in the corner over there.

Hmmm. You’re not going to figure out how to put yourself back together by carrying those pieces around in that bag. Why don’t you empty them out and sit down?

But…

If you want to sit with me, and it looks like you need to, empty the bag and sit among your broken pieces. It’s not nearly as hard to sit here as it is to admit you need to.   

Setting the bag down, gently dumping my pieces out at my feet, and slowly lowering myself to the floor, I knew Job was right. Getting down in the dirt of my brokenness was far easier than forcing myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other while I hefted my brokenness on my back, weighing down every step I took. Somehow breathing got easier, even as all words left me. Occasionally, I would reach out to try to touch, examine, make sense of my broken pieces on the floor, but Job would look over at me and raise an eyebrow as if to say, “Not now. You know it’s not time yet.” Each time, I retracted my hand and returned to the reigning silence among the ashes. The longer I sit here, the more I can feel an expansive softness open up inside me. Where I felt like I was hitting rock bottom over and over as all that this pandemic has required of me comes crashing in, now the rock is slowly transforming into a safety net with the firmness to catch me and the flexibility to cradle me as I fall. With this softening comes an openness and acceptance for those around me, for the burdens they also are carrying in these treacherous times. Good, I think, this will help. How good it is that I can accept people for who they are in the midst of our shared hardship. Then Job opens his mouth: 

Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’ Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it. (Job 3:3-4)

Job goes on, first cursing his existence and then, as if he can’t actually imagine not existing, wishing he had died at birth so he could even now be resting in Sheol. That’s when he loses me. 

How dare you, Job?! How dare you wish to inflict a baby’s death on your mother, even if that baby is you?! 

Excuse you. This is my pain. My pain that is too great to bear. It would be better to die at birth than to ever face such pain as this. This pain keeps coming and coming. There is no break, no reprieve. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes. (Job 3:26)

 Better for who, Job? Maybe better for you, but certainly not for your mother who would have to continue to live a life without the child she bore in her body for nine months. 

Even that pain could not be worse than the rotating door of pain, sorrow, grief, and bad news I keep having to bear now.

Job, I know the end of your story. You’re going to be fine. And surely even now, your pain is not as bad as all this. This too shall pass.

You may know the end of my story, but you don’t know the end of your own. So, sit and listen. 

I needed that reprimand. For all that sitting among my broken pieces had started to soften me, I struggled to encounter Job’s pain. I wanted to say whatever it took to get Job to move past his pain so we could get on with the story. But in my haste to say something, I ignored the most important thing happening on that dirty floor. I ignored our shared human vulnerability—Job’s and my own. This is one of the reasons Job is a good sitting companion for this moment. I need perspective and vulnerability. I need to witness that my neighbors are also struggling right now in both unique and all-to-common ways. I need to witness that I and my global neighbors need vulnerable spaces, permission to be human. Note: not permission to be jackasses acting out of our pain or ignorance to wound others. No, permission to be human, to be heavy, exhausted, spread too thin, uncertain, and anxious. Whether my version of sackcloth and ashes is sweatpants and a bag of M&Ms, or collapsing into the bed every night and dragging my still tired body up every morning, or staying up too late binge watching my favorite crime drama to escape the unresolvable drama of my current reality, Job and I share a deep desire to shut down, followed by an equally important impulse to yell at God about it all. And that’s ok. That makes me, Job, and you, if any of this applies to you, human. Vulnerably human. 

If this is what it means to be a vulnerable human, then for a while, I am just going to have to get uncomfortably cozy with Job’s vulnerability and my own. Answers aren’t going to come quickly. Resolution to all that is scarily unknown may be even farther away. I share with Job this cry that I am not at ease or quiet in my spirit. Rest is difficult, and the only guarantee I seem to have is that trouble will keep coming. But, somehow, sitting with my broken pieces, not trying to analyze or fix them, just sitting with them is reconnecting me with my humanity and my vulnerability. And mysteriously, there is a strange kind of rest that comes in the silence as my brokenness lays on the dusty, ash-strewn floor next to the brokenness of others. 

Out of this silence comes more speaking and speculating as the first of Job’s friends, Eliphaz, speaks up, and Job argues back. Next week, I will focus on these two speeches, found in Job 4-6. Until then, may God bless our sitting, our waiting, our watching, and our hoping.