Tim Timmons - Cast My CaresSample

You Remain

12 years ago I was diagnosed with an incurable cancer and given five years to live. How’s that for an introduction! There are few more sobering moments in one’s life than when everything around you seems to stand still like some dramatic scene from a movie. You become dangerously intimate with the reality of your mortality. Hopelessness, like a thief, helps itself into the door of your soul. Whether you’ve had a similar experience or some form of sorrow handed to you, you know this feeling.

Misery loves company, so thankfully Jesus led me to the story of Job. You may know this story of how Job was a man who loved his God and yet was afflicted with pain, sorrow, and bitter loss. From having everything to having nothing, boils from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, to his family being killed off, Job was on all accounts cursed and felt abandoned. Everything that could have gone wrong for him did and there was no rhyme or reason that he could see for the calamity. Have you ever feel like this? Hung out to dry, left for dead, confused by the God you thought you knew?

For 37 chapters, Job and his remaining companions wrestled back and forth with words that searched for meaning within the realm of human reasoning, to no avail. Have you ever wrestled with God so much that your quest for answers seems hopeless?

Finally in the 38th chapter of the book of Job, God replies with great power and sarcasm:

“Who is this that obscures my plans

with words without knowledge?

³ Brace yourself like a man;

I will question you,

and you shall answer me.

⁴ Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

Tell me, if you understand.

⁵ Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it?”

…and so on and so on.

The story ends where Job responds with the only weapons he has left: humility and awe. Then God restored Job with twice as much as he had before.

What if in our pain and sorrow we got a glimpse of the greatness of our God? How would this change our posture through it?