Job 3 | Wayfarer

“Why is light given to those in misery,
    and life to the bitter of soul,
to those who long for death that does not come,
    who search for it more than for hidden treasure,
who are filled with gladness
    and rejoice when they reach the grave?”
Job 3:20-22 (NIV)

One of the things that Wendy and I have noticed in our marriage is that birthdays are treated a bit differently in our families. In essence, the siblings in my family don’t really pay much attention to each other’s birthdays. I never expect to hear from them on my birthday, and I feel no expectation to do so for them. In our family system, birthdays are a thing between parents and children, but it doesn’t extend to siblings and their families. Wendy’s family, on the other hand, experiences an explosion of activity on the family text string whenever anyone in the family has a birthday. Everyone is in. Everyone celebrates, even if it is simply a text of good wishes.

Today’s chapter is the first we hear of Job’s thoughts as he sits on the refuse pile of broken pottery and the ashes from people burning their garbage. In one day he lost every one of his earthly blessings. His wealth was stolen by enemies. His children died in a natural disaster. Then, he lost even his health. As we begin what will be twenty-four chapters of conversation between Job and his three friends regarding his suffering, we find the emaciated, disfigured Job covered in his festering skin sores from head to toe, scraping at the sores with pieces of broken pottery. His friends have sat silently in commiseration with Job for seven days.

When Job finally speaks, the first thing he does is curse his birthday. The day that friends and loved ones gather to celebrate each year. The one day each year when every person is celebrated and made to feel special. Job, in his intense suffering, laments that he was even born only for his life to lead to this intense loss and affliction. What Job longs for, he says, is death. He wants an end to the pain.

This past year, a nurse sat down with my Dad and me to discuss my mother who was in memory care. What they shared with us is that my mother, painfully thin and living in the increasingly bitter reality of memory loss, showed all of the signs of someone who had “given up” on life. Like Job, she was on her own ash heap of life. She refused to eat, she began to sleep more and more, and she was increasingly life-less during her diminished waking hours. We agreed with the nurses recommendation to allow Hospice to take over her daily care.

I learned so much in the few months that followed. The wonderful nurses of Hospice taught me that there is a certain pattern and cadence that a person in my mother’s condition takes in the final stretch of her earthly journey. One of the hardest adjustments for me to make during this period of time was embracing her loss of will to live. When she refused to eat, I wanted to force feed her. When she slept all day, I wanted to get her up and make her take a walk with me. When she was awake yet seemed uninterested in engaging with me, I wanted to find some way, any way, to get some signs of involvement in conversation from her. The Hospice nurses taught me that forcing food, waking, and engagement was actually the worse thing we could do. I had to force myself to be content with reading Psalms to her when she was asleep, sitting silently with her and holding her hand when she was awake, and allowing her and her body to dictate what she needed each moment.

In the quiet this morning, I can’t help but think that in those few months I was not unlike one of Job’s friends. I read one commentator who, in referencing Job’s friends sitting with Job in silence for seven days, shared the opinion that they should have remained silent, foreshadowing the foolishness and unhelpful words they will utter in the following chapters.

Just this past week, my dad and sister and I spent a few days at the lake together. It was this past St. Patrick’s Day when our family celebrated mom’s life. Her body was cremated. She and dad have a cemetery plot where both their ashes will be buried, but we felt no rush to do this in the cold Iowa spring weather. We decided to put this off until it was warmer and we could gather as a family around the grave and celebrate to celebrate her and remember all the life and goodness she gave us.

While at the lake we decided on August 18th as the day we will lay her remains to rest.

August 18th is her birthday.

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

“May the day of my birth perish,
and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’”
Job 3:1 (NIV)

There are always interesting differences that emerge when you marry someone from a different family system. I never expected birthday traditions to be one of them, but life is full of surprises. I come from a family that celebrated birthdays, but did it as a rather low key affair. Mom baked our favorite cake. There were a few small presents from mom and dad, but we never did much of anything between siblings. In the childhood years birthdays meant you could have a sleepover (with a maximum of two friends). It was a special day that I looked forward to as a child, but as the years went by my feelings and expectations around birthdays diminished.

As I progressed into adulthood, the low key birthday traditions of my family evolved into even more low key expectations. If my siblings and I even remember each other birthdays there may, perhaps, be a phone call or voice mail message with kind wishes, though even that is not an expectation. Once in a great while there might be a token gift or a gag gift, but those rare occasions are frosting on the proverbial birthday cake. My family is so bad with remembering birthdays that my siblings and I will occasionally text each other reminders knowing that it’s likely someone forgot.

I’m not proud of this, mind you. It is what it is. Yet, along the journey I’ve come to realize that my low-key traditions and expectations surrounding birthdays are rather offensive to particular friends and loved ones. Wendy finds it appalling, and it only took one memorably disastrous birthday into our marriage to discover that I had better raise the bar for myself when it comes to the annual celebration of her birth. I’m a work in progress.

All of this pondering about birthdays comes as I read Job’s lamentation this morning. His tragic circumstances cause him to rue the day of his birth. Forget being low-key about the date, he curses the day he was born. No matter where you land on the importance of birthdays, there is no doubt that the day of our birth has inherent meaning. It is a special date because it was the date we entered this world. Birthdays, whether low-key or grand affairs, are linked to a celebration of life. To curse the day of our birth is to curse the precious gift of life that God purposed in our being and existence in this world.

I hear in Job’s words the kind of extreme, all-or-nothing thoughts that I have commonly witnessed coming out of despair both in myself and in others. Our life can feel so terrible in this one moment that we are blind to anything worthwhile, life-giving, or redemptive about our lives to this point. Extreme circumstances birth extreme emotions which, in turn, produce extreme thoughts (and sometimes actions). I don’t find anything sinful or improper in this. It is altogether human to experience these thoughts and emotions. The threat that this brings to our lives is to either give in to the extreme thoughts and emotions until it conquers our spirit, or to deny the thoughts and emotions in what will be an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that we are unaffected by our circumstances. Either of these ultimately end in the diminishment of Life.

Today I am thankful for Job and the day of his birth. I am thankful for the example he gives us in the honesty of his grief. This important human emotion, when experienced and processed in healthy ways, can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of life.

I am also thinking today about birthdays and my relative nonchalance surrounding them. Birthdays are a celebration of lives that mean a lot to me, and lives that have deeply impacted me and my own life journey. They are an opportunity to say, “You are important to me.” Lesson noted. I’ve got some work to do.