I’m on vacation for three weeks. While I’m gone, please enjoy the top 15 posts from 2023 based on total number of page views and podcast plays. Cheers!

“To God belong wisdom and power;
    counsel and understanding are his.”
Job 12:13 (NIV)

This past weekend, I gave a message among my local gathering of Jesus’ followers. I began the message by citing three articles I had randomly come across from my daily perusal of the news. In each case, they spoke of the current epidemic of anxiety in our culture, especially among teenagers and young adults. One of the articles I read discussed the root of this epidemic and suggested that it lies with parents.

For most of human history, children and young adults lived with the stress, anxiety, and insecurity that simply comes from living on this earth. My generation rolls our eyes at young people who are connected to their parents 24/7/365. One meme I recently saw said “my parents didn’t know where I was the entire decade of the 1980s!” It’s funny because it’s true.

I grew up having to learn to cope with naturally stressful situations because I had no choice. If I got a flat tire driving through rural Iowa, I couldn’t call someone. I couldn’t use GPS to figure out where I was or where the nearest farmhouse was. I either changed the tire with the spare in the trunk or started hoofing it until I found a farmhouse and risked knocking on the door of a stranger to ask for help.

Today’s young generations have had the luxury of parents who can and do protect them from every uncomfortable situation as they grow. Parents have gone out of their way to effectively eliminate stress, difficulty, and danger from their children’s lives while taking care of their children’s every need and granting most of their affluent, earthly desires. As these children “adult” they now see any difficulty or natural life stress as inherently bad and something to be avoided at all costs. They expect their adult lives to be as easy as their parents made their childhood and young adult years. In some cases, children refuse to leave home and feel unable to cope independently in a cruel world.

Wendy and I recently had dinner with a friend whose young adult child is walking through an acutely painful stretch of their life journey. The pain results from the actions of another person. As we explored the circumstances and the host of negative consequences that have resulted, the conversation eventually turned to our own respective life journeys. Every one of us could identify painful stretches of our own respective life journeys, and in each case the pain served to produce progress toward personal and spiritual maturity in our lives.

Perhaps the most meaningful and useful life lesson that I have gleaned from the Great Story in my 40+ years of study is the fact that suffering can produce personal and spiritual maturity while lives free of struggle are likely to produce personal and spiritual immaturity. A diverse trio of voices echo this same general principle in the Great Story: Paul in Romans 5:3-5, Peter in 1 Peter 1:6-7, and James in James 1:2-3. Struggle promotes a host of character qualities that lead to wisdom, wholeness, and spiritual maturity.

In today’s chapter, Job continues to struggle with the “why” of his suffering. He wants to know why he is going through this painful stretch of his life journey. He wants to pin the blame on something or someone. In recognizing that an omnipotent God controls all of creation, Job continues to prosecute God as the perpetrator of his circumstances.

What’s fascinating is that Job continues to hold that every event in nature and history is a direct result of God’s willful action. That’s a lot of blame to pin on God in a fallen world in which billions of sinful people have the God-given free will to choose to hurt others, even unwittingly and with the best of intentions.

In the quiet my mind wanders back to our friend’s child and the pain that young adult is experiencing as the result of another person’s actions. I think about the painful events our own daughters have had to navigate and survive in their young adult years. I recognize how those events contributed to growing them up in positive and necessary ways. I think of other friends I know with adult children still living at home unable to cope with life outside of their parents provision and enabling.

There is progress in pain if I move beyond blame.

Chapter to read for tomorrow’s Best of 2023: Job 40

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.