Why is it hard to know the value of a life until that life is gone?
When you are making your way through life there may be little time for pondering what is of real value to you. If you still have a strong mind as you grow older, you think more and more about what is really valuable and it almost always revolves around the relationships you have had. In fact, when it comes time for giving away your possessions because you simply have too many of them, the last thing to go are often the photos or other special mementos of those relationships. Pictures of family or friends may be the hardest to part with.
Clothes can be given to Good Will, old cans of food placed in bags and given to the pathfinders, shoes tossed away that no longer fit. A million things really, that can be discarded with little pain attached to them. They have become meaningless.
Aging into your 70’s or 80’s is often a returning to your roots, a land of beginning again. You still have your whole life ahead of you, it’s just shortened in time. But it may be lengthened by the way you spend that time. It is indeed, a valuable time, a time of value. Almost everyone I’ve ever known at that time in their lives is given the opportunity to review the value of their lives and the value of those around them. It’s truly impossible to calculate those values but it is still filled with emotion and pleasure and pain, and worth the effort.
It was so profoundly deep and painful for Job after Satan attacked him and his family, wiping them out, that he wished for nothing but death. In fact, the pain was so great, he wished he had never been born.
3 1-5 After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He said:
“May the day of my birth perish,
and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’
That day—may it turn to darkness;
may God above not care about it;
may no light shine on it.
May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more;
may a cloud settle over it;
may blackness overwhelm it.
And 23-26
Why is life given to a man
whose way is hidden,
whom God has hedged in?
For sighing has become my daily food;
my groans pour out like water.
What I feared has come upon me;
what I dreaded has happened to me.
I have no peace, no quietness;
I have no rest, but only turmoil.”
This is one of those chapters in the Bible that I wish we never had to read. It makes me wonder about Adam and Eve, it even makes me wonder about God. How could God create the people and the conditions for evil to become established? How could Adam and Eve bring this evil into being? Why does death have to be the only way to resolve the broken conditions in the world?
If answers are possible to those questions and many more like them, then it is only possible to those that take this chapter and explore its pain and emotion and sorrow. There are many chapters left in the book of Job after this one, hinting at answers to come. Nonetheless, this is the one to saturate in, to start with, to understand deeply.
Job was living a pretty good life until his family was destroyed. Then he would trade it all in as if it never happened. When he realized the value of what he had, he began to revalue everything. What was he left with and what did he value on the day he wrote this? We all are likely to come to that point.
This Re-Valuing is the real beginning of a rich and rewarding life. I’ve tried to do it several times in my life, hopefully before tragedy strikes, sometimes after. Whatever we do, there is much to learn by sitting with Job in chapter 3. It may be the only way out of the darkness and back into the light.
