While looking through a list of books someone recommends I read, I came across one that ostensibly deals with the concept of why bad things happen to good people. Having been through and still in a phase of life where I feel like that, I feel no pressing need to read someone else’s rendition of belief, but it made me think a little more about the Job Phase of Mortality.
For most people, when the going gets rough, they quit. To be quite honest, this morning I really really wanted to NOT run. However, having gained three pounds on my camping trip to the Tetons last week, I knew I had no choice but to countermand that trend by keeping to my standards. In the end, if I don’t get what I want, it will not be because I did not do my part.
So, when the going gets rough, what do I do? I pray a lot. Sometimes I shake my fist in the air and ask God like in Fiddler on the Roof to go bless someone else for a while. After a long train of difficulties, most people prefer a period of respite rather than simply a continuity of blessings in the form of trials. If you’re not sure where the current suffering is going, perhaps, you’ve entered the Job Phase.
After being beset by trials, Job turned to prayer. Noticeably absent, however, are answers to those prayers. Now, I do not presume to know why God may choose to shut the gates of prayer when one approaches, but I have a theory. There comes a point when you have to learn to stand on your own.
It took my father a long time to teach me the basic coming of age traditions of boyhood. In particular, I found it difficult to ride a bike, and I used training wheels far past the period of prudence, until I came to rely on them. My father rightfully knew how continuity of the status quo would make me fit scorn for my fellows and pushed to remove them, running alongside to help keep me up. At least until one day, when he, like CS Lewis writes God must, “withdraw all the supports and incentives [and] leave the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.”
One of my favorite short films illustrates the force of will. A man takes a shortcut across the desert in unfamiliar territory. After his car breaks down, he treks across the dunes looking for anything and comes across a pump in a dilapidated ghost town. Despite his efforts, the pump doesn’t start, and he plops down frustrated. At that time, he notices a note in the cup swinging beneath the spigot and reads it. IN the note, it tells of a bottle of water hidden beneath a rock and how anyone just needs to prime the pump and it will give plenty of water. The man ignores the note, taking the water and treks back into the desert. As he collapses and drops the bottle, the camera shows a drop of water building at the faucet he left behind.
Putting down our will as subservient to the will of the father is the true test of mortality. At the time of greatest need, even the Savior found the Gates of Prayer shut to him, to make it possible for him to demonstrate that his will was swallowed up in that of the father. Of the importance of the Job Phase, CS Lewis continues:
It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He [God] wants it to be…. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
When the Gates of Prayer close to you, how will you respond? Your salvation depends on your answer.
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