(Job 37)

ps—this is my first phoster. how’d i do?

When I was home over Christmas my Mother decided it was time to clean out the basement. She hauled four boxes upstairs that were full of photos, junior high report cards, pay stubs from my high school job and cell phone bills from 2002 and made me shred/recycle/throw out whatever was not absolutely essential. Somewhere along the way, we unearthed this literary masterpiece written and illustrated by my youngest brother at age 7. What a creative kid! Mike is one of the funniest people I know in real life. Looks like his sense of humor developed at an early age.

No Words Wednesday

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1864

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.”

—T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930

(Source)

I was unemployed for 87 days and it sucked. I shed more tears in those 87 days than I ever have before and for me that’s really saying something. I’m reluctant to call it suffering though because it seems so small compared to the real life tragedies and trials that some people go through. But I guess it was a kind of suffering, a valley I had to walk through. Now that I’ve started working again, I’ve been looking back at those 87 days and trying to figure out just what exactly God was teaching me through that time. What did I learn about myself? What did I learn about Him? I want to remember these lessons for next time I have to go through something hard or am feeling particularly broken.

My brother got me this copy of My Utmost for His Highest for Christmas 2007. It has sat on my bedside table next to my bible for the past four years. I don’t read it every day, but the days I do pick it up it seems like the message is always timely. This week the entries have been all about faith, and how faith matures. This entry from yesterday really struck me.

“The first thing God does with us is to get us based on (his) rugged Reality until we do not care what becomes of us individually as long as He gets His way for the purpose of His Redemption. Why shouldn’t we go through heartbreaks? Through those doorways God is opening up ways of fellowship with His Son. Most of us fall and collapse at the first grip of pain; we sit down on the threshold of God’s purpose and die away of self-pity and all so-called Christian sympathy will aid us to our death bed. But God will not. He comes with the grip of the pierced hand of His Son and says—’Enter into fellowship with Me; arise and shine.’ If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.”
—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, 1917

“The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
‘I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends…’ ”

—T.S. Eliot, Prufrock, 1917