God's Good Advice

Job is an interesting tale. Here is a man who has everything in the world and not only that, but the world thinks highly of him. He's somehow done what so many of us struggle to do and surrounded himself with good friends - the kind of good friends who will come and sit on an ash heap with him and talk about life, God, and faith. 

Those are good friends. 

And yet...they're wrong. 

We know this because we remember this every time we read the story. Once you've read it a time or two, it's hard to read without getting frustrated or downright angry with Job's friends because they're just spouting all this religious-sounding stuff - the kind of stuff we're all familiar with ourselves and that hasn't been helpful to us in our times of trouble - but it lacks fundamental understanding and basic...kindness. 

Job's friends mean well, but they are not nice to him. Actually, I think they think they are being nice. I think they think they are speaking the "hard truth" that Job "needs to hear" and that "real" friendship is sometimes "tough love," and the more Job pushes back against them and tells them they are misguided, the more they double down until you get the sense they are at the very least exasperated with him. At most, they think maybe he's duped them and he's not the kind of guy that they thought he was. 

Now we're getting into the kind of friends that most of us know. 

The arguments we get into with our friends are not over our differences of opinion. It doesn't matter to us, when we're really in relationship with someone, whether they like chocolate cake when we like vanilla or whether they buy from the local coffee shop down the street or the big name chain place across town. Preferences don't matter; it's the deeper stuff that makes us friends. We believe that we have the relationship to speak the hard truth to one another. 

And...that's why they're our friends. We trust them to do that. 

In fact, many of us go to our friends more often than we go to God when we need advice. We ask our friends what they think. We ask them to pray with us. We invite them to sit in our ash heap and reflect and reminisce and ruminate and help us figure out where we go from here, what's happening, what our next step is. 

Then, we get disappointed when that's not going well. In hard times, a lot of us find that our friends are a lot like Job's friends - well-meaning, but rough around the edges. They have a lot to say, but not a lot that seems to be in context. They have their opinions, but not a lot of understanding. I think every single one of us can think of a time we got angry with our very good friends, maybe even started yelling at them or sulking away, because they just didn't "get it." 

We forget that we have one Very Good Friend who does. 

This is Who Job remembers (which is why he can give such grace to his earthly friends). It's how he's able to look at his friends, thank them for sitting in his ash heap with him, invite him to say, but gently reject their advice. He knows, and he plainly says, "With God is the sum total of all wisdom and of all power; His is the greatest of plans and the deepest of comprehensions" (12:13). 

In other words - God understands what we don't. God understands what our friends don't. So when we're looking for understanding and good advice, it's God alone who can give it to us. 

And if we're lucky, we'll have some friends to sit in the dust together while we wait to hear it.