Job - A Story of Unlikely JoyMfano

When I was a freshman in high school, I left all my friends and a sparkling clean, recently built school with every amenity to attend a very old school with zero modern amenities and a constant police presence. However, at this school, I learned to love people who didn’t look like me or live in my neighborhood. I learned that skin color, zip codes, and test scores were petty details and useless qualifiers for real relationships. I learned how to engage through dialogue instead of distancing through diatribe. I learned that entitlement is the archenemy of creativity, passion, and joy. I learned that building something by the sweat of your brow is a lot more rewarding than having it handed to you. I learned to lead Bible studies in Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It’s where we first studied the theme of adoption in the Bible and made a solemn promise that we’d adopt hard-to-place kids when we grew up—which means it’s also where I unwittingly began the journey of becoming Missy’s mama, thirty years before her first mama died from AIDS in a small village in Haiti. 

The greatest theological minds in Christendom history haven’t been able to answer the question of why our Redeemer allows suffering, so you’d better bet I can’t. But I do have enough life experience to believe that if we trust God is good and He does good, hardship won’t make us bitter; it will actually make us better. It won’t break us; it will make us. The truism of God’s absolute goodness has followed me all of my days, including times of much greater grief—my parents’ divorce, sexual abuse as a child, rape in college, multiple abusive and toxic relationships as a young adult, losing both of my fathers, a heartbreaking failed adoption at the eleventh hour, and many other seasons of suffering. Now in my fifties, it’s safe to say I’ve lived more life than I have life left to live. When I look back over my entire story thus far, I can honestly tell you I have never seen God’s back. Mind you, there are still lots of things I don’t understand, and there have been losses I almost couldn’t bear. But through it all, I have never experienced His absence. I don’t know why God allows His children to suffer, but I do know that He always makes Himself accessible to us when we ache.