Job had a point. Sometimes life just gets too much, and all seems against us. If there is a God, he or she seems not to care. The universe feels indifferent to suffering and injustice.
It's natural to fight it.
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas "pulled a Job" when he wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night,I have always found his poem powerful in its sentiment, as much as I have sided with Job against the seeming unfair and arbitrary nature of misfortune.
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
So, fight, fight, fight. It only seems right.
But then to what end?
If the universe had decreed, if God has said, if Allah has willed it, then to fight might be to bang your head against a brick wall. Or would the raging cause a change? Does God change God's mind in answer to human barracking? Is nature moved by my cry?
Answers to such are above my pay grade.
It only seems right to fight back.
Yet, there is a different way, and somewhat counterintuitive. It is to yield rather than to fight back. It is to observe the movement of nature, and to flow with it. "The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world" says the Dao (Mitchell version 43).
I hear this, too, in the response of Jesus in his extremity, "Not my will but yours be done."
Perhaps to yield gently to a hard test that life brings is a better response than to rage and fight.
"And all will be well," said mother Julian.
Peace and Goodness to all,
+Ab. Andy