And then God answered Job in the whirlwind. Well, it wasn’t an answer so much as a declaration of how insignificant Job was in comparison to God. And it was God’s way of saying that Job has no case against God; that no matter how obedient he was, it didn’t matter.
Obedience is all that God asks of us. It is a hard thing really. To be obedient to God means you have to not sin or acknowledge His cosmic loophole. The former is impossible for everyone, the latter is next to impossible for many people.
In our pride, our arrogance, we think that we can control the outcomes of our lives, take hold of our destinies, and change the world for the better. Yet we can barely control when our next bowel movement is or the rate of our heartbeat.
Many people overcompensate. They find themselves trying to control the external things like what we eat, how we dress, or what we drive. We build civilizations for comfort and then destroy them in that comfort. We find ourselves struggling each day yet living a life of contentment.
Mankind is a strange collection of contradictions. We live each thinking we will live on yet we know our deaths are inevitable. We believe we have cracked the mysteries of the universe only to not understand why things are the way they are.
I find myself wondering what life would have been like if I had done things differently. But then I cannot change what has been done any more than I can control my need to breath air. Yet the sadness still remains. What could have been will only lead to more sadness at a loss of what was.
So I find myself at a weird place that nobody really seems to understand. Everyone else is just as selfish and self-absorbed as I am I suppose. It’s the human condition I guess.
But I try. I try to make things better for myself. I try to make things better for my son. And I try to gain a better relationship with my wife. Because if I give it all up, then I am just a failure.
I suppose none of that will matter too much in the end. I won’t be remembered by anyone beyond my own family and the few friends I have. And they’ll all die and I’ll just some ancestor to someone just as mediocre and introspective.
Wisdom is a curse in this way. You begin to see things in a much more long-term perspective, longer than what most people are used to. It is no wonder that Solomon called most of life a chasing after the wind.
I wonder if God even notices me most of the time. I wonder if it even matters to Him. Still I will do my best to not provoke Him to anger and hope that He allows me to remain with Him in the end. Maybe I can get a nice house there with tons of books. Maybe I’ll just explore the world, His creation, and perhaps even travel beyond all of this to see what else was made besides all of this. For now, my curse prevents me from doing so in a thorough manner.
I’m just a tourist after all.