The Book of Job

I've been looking at this old Biblical tale and wondering about it. You could say I've been having a "Job-experience" in my life for quite sometime. I'd have to say it's been incremental, and not a before-and-after type of thing. For instance, for seven years at a time I was covered head to toe with hives. I went to countless doctors for a cure, and en masse they shrugged. Could this have been the work of Satan to test my faith? Then there was the years of abuse at the hands of the man I dearly loved. This led me without a doubt to deeper faith rather than away from it, but ultimately what I had faith would happen never did -- that he would finally love me enough not to hit me. What happend, of course, was that I finally changed and said, "enough."

Now my "Job-experience" is that I'm poorer than I've ever been since I was maybe 23 years old. Truly I'm starting over with just the advantage of experience that tells me that I have had abundance and maybe it will come again if I am competant. I no longer worry about being brilliant or special. The blessing of experience is knowing that competance is actually more important in the long-run.

I have two children, but only 1/2 way. 1/2 of the time they are away from me as if they were gone completely. It honestly causes me to cry on a daily basis not to have them in my life as they should be in my life. This is not what I had faith would come about. My challenge is to find the blessing somehow in it. This is my biggest struggle because I so want to protect them from the very life I brought them into!

Also, my boyfriend, a steady, gentle, kind and supportive man who helps me keep the faith in many ways, lives far away and travels for his job about 70% of the month. I see him when he can afford to come see me, but then I need his financial help, so he can't come see me as often. This I have to look at as some sort of opportunity, and when he is near to appreciate his presence one hundred percent.

I have read that this story of Job is about a self-righteous man becoming truly right. That is going from an external belief about God and what it means to be blessed, to an enlightened internal belief in God that understands that circumstances and appearances have nothing to do with the blessing of light and love. In a sense, happiness is a choice, and a moment. I see my life as a connect-a-dot affair. The dots are moments of happiness that I leap to with the choice to find them. They may boil down to a pleasant exchange at the grocery story, or a hug from my son, or the evolution of my daughter into a young lady. As I leap from moment of happiness and realization, I create the shape of my life.