God will not always grant us everything we ask for and everything we want, but He will always give us what we need. As humans, we are susceptible to despair and feelings of unworthiness, but we are just as likely to sinfully assume that we deserve more than what we are given. We are sinners, certainly, but God sees past our sins and who we have defined ourselves to be based on our decisions in order to reach out to us and to invite us out of sin. Sometimes when He does this, though, our inadequacies rise up to the surface and our judgment becomes clouded. If you personally need to hear this at this particular moment in life, read this very carefully: God is calling you. He has a plan for you and He needs you to accept His invitation. You have a role to play in the world, which comes with a certain level of responsibility, but God has designed His will in such a way that your participation is required. You are worthy, but not because of anything you have done - you are worthy of this role simply because God has declared you to be so.

The words of Job in this passage are particularly common in the modern age. Why do I have to be alive? I didn’t ask to be born, so why do I have to go through life and suffer? Why can’t God leave me alone since I don’t want to have responsibilities and I certainly don’t want to suffer? Why can’t He just allow me to die so that I don’t have to go through pain anymore? These are truly heartbreaking sentiments, but they are so prevalent in the world today because no one focuses on finding meaning anymore. People focus on living day by day, distracting themselves with the few things that give them joy or contentment. Every action we undergo is done in such a way that aims at preventing any form of suffering or discomfort in our lives. But it is in our struggles where the most meaning can be found; why didn’t God just let Job die? Beyond that, why did God permit Job to suffer so greatly when he had been having a fruitful and faithful life before? In the simplest language, God still had a plan for Job. Job’s current sufferings were merely a blip in the story of his life. Our own struggles are only temporary and often brief, but when we are in the midst of them, there is hardly anything else we are able to focus on. But God keeps us right where we are, just as He did with Job, so that we may discover what more He has planned for us in this life.

Why is light given to the toilers and life to the bitter in Spirit? Why does God give long lives to those who want it the least? Their suffering is a part of their role in Salvation History. Take for example the life of Saint Vincent de Paul, whose name is synonymous with helping and serving those who are in need the most. The charity associated with St. Vincent is a reflection of his divine and Godly love for his neighbor, as is the case with those active in the ministries named after the great saint. We recognize the suffering of our neighbor, and we walk alongside them in solidarity and empathy, sharing in their experience and showing them that they are worthy of being treated with human dignity. This is what Christ did for us by becoming man and going to his death on the cross for us. It was all to show us that we are worthy of God’s love. God loves us and He has a plan for us. It is our responsibility now to be open to listening and working with that plan, especially in the face of suffering. 

Faithful Catholics are in a unique position when we are faced with tremendous difficulty or a situation that seems hopeless. For most people, facing difficulty can either ruin them or make them better; encountering hopeless situations for these people also immediately leads them to give up. But if we are sincere in our faith as Catholics, our options are limited - we have to jump head-first into difficult moments. We have to place complete trust in God that He will never lead us into hopeless situations if we are indeed following His will. Still, we are only human and it is completely natural for us to be scared and have doubts about God’s providence. Our ultimate decision, though, is to resign ourselves to the fact that God knows exactly what He is doing and all we have to do is listen to Him.

As we continue to hear about Job in this passage and his experiences going through the worst time in his life, he tells his friends that he knows that as much as he might want to forge his own path, go astray from God, or define his own future, his knowledge of the world and even his own life is nothing compared to God’s knowledge. Job finds it difficult to believe that God actually cares about him, listens to him, and has an interest in his life. When we look at the experiences within our own lives, we seem to echo the sentiment of Job: no one else in the world cares about me as much as I care about myself. For the most part, I am completely meaningless or, at best, insignificant to the vast majority of people in my life. How is it, then, that I am supposed to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present God not only cares about me, but cares about me more than I care about myself and cares about me more than anything else in the world? It’s simple: He actually puts the time in for us. For those whom we love most, we will do anything to carve out the time, energy, and attention that is needed for them. God offers all of these things infinitely to each one of us individually.

Do you have a hard time accepting this? Simply read the Gospels. All it takes is for one follower to tell Jesus that he will follow wherever he goes, when Jesus responds in such a way that gives the listener an opportunity to initiate the discipleship: “the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” Like a good friend or lover, Jesus is telling us his needs so that we may be aware of them, attentive to them, and do what we can to satisfy them. He would only do so if he wanted us to give of ourselves as a place for him to reside. Beyond that, Jesus literally calls another to follow him. There is no time even to bury the most significant person in your life, nor is there time to even say goodbye to your loved ones; discipleship is a complete and total focus on God alone. Would God make these demands of you if He did not care about you? He wants all of your attention, just as you would want all of the attention of the one whom you love the most. God is madly in love with you and you are the recipient of the totality of His love. To reciprocate that and make Him the sole recipient of your capacity to love is the only way you will make the most out of your life. Are you willing to trust His call? Are you willing to follow Him no matter what? You’ve trusted Him so far. How could you not trust that He is giving you exactly what you were made for?

It is only natural to be angry with God during certain times in your life. When things outside of your control begin to crumble around you, you are left helpless and hopeless, completely unable to do anything about it. If you are someone who is good at fixing the problems that arise based on your decisions, this can be especially frustrating because there is literally nothing you can do to make your life better. According to the way that we see the world, those things that are outside of your control are ultimately controlled by God, since He is the creator of the Universe. If life begins to fall apart and it is outside of your control, it is certainly under the control of God, who immediately becomes the focus of our blame. How can God, if He truly loved us, allow us to go through these seasons of utter failure and suffering?

You have almost certainly blamed God for the problems in your life at one point or another. You have made demands of Him, and cursed Him for not answering you. We all have, especially in the midst of the storms of life. But out of the storm, God communicates back to us; again, not in a way that we want, but in the way that He sees most appropriate in His infinite wisdom. God speaks to us through Scripture, when He addresses those who went through the same issues in life that we do today, even if they lived thousands of years ago. In this passage, God offers His response to all of us when we express our anger and mistrust in Him and His plan. He does so by responding to Job, who seemingly has every right to be angry at God, since at the beginning of Job’s story God permits Satan to bring immeasurable suffering into his life. God’s response to Job’s rebuke of Him is extremely humbling and uncomfortable to hear. Are we the ones who command the sun to rise in the morning? Have we gone to the ends of the world, knowing every detail about the ground we walk on or the depths below us? Have any of us seen the glory that might await us in Heaven or the torment that might await us in Hell? If we are so exhausted from suffering, do we know where we can find ultimate fulfillment and happiness? If we are content in life, do we know what is the source of any potential suffering? God even seems to use sarcasm against Job, telling him that he should know all of these things because he is older and wiser. Ultimately, we know nothing of these matters. All we know is ourselves - what makes us happy and what makes us sad. Everything else in life is simply a natural response to this very simplistic and selfish worldview.

God is not like that. He commands the sun to rise in the morning and to set at night. He not only knows every detail within His creation, but loves each detail deeply and orders them to fulfill their responsibilities given to them by their nature. He knows the things that exist in our world that even we, as inhabitants, could not fathom. He not only knows Heaven, but is the fullness of Heaven itself and all the contentment that comes from it. He also knows the depths of hell and what true suffering is, namely the complete absence of His presence in one’s life. His understanding of why things happen or why He permits things to happen is not based on His age or His wisdom, because that would mean He had to learn how to let the world operate. Instead, He is wisdom itself, and everything is perfectly ordered to ultimately come back to Him. Feel free to express your anger with God, but return to His words to Job as His response to you. We do not understand why He permits what He does, but we know He is infinitely good. We must trust Him.

Humans are wickedly sinful. We deserve none of the graces or the forgiveness we receive from God, yet He still insists on freely offering them to us simply because of His love. This is a gift freely given with nothing expected in return; still, once we understand just how astronomical our debt to God is for inviting us out of our sin, we can easily fall into scrupulosity or dread. This is not what God wants from us, which we should clearly understand simply because of His willingness to invite us back to Him. Consider the following hypothetical situation: a very wealthy person who you happen to know understands that you are struggling to pay whatever bills you may have. They decide to not only give you money to cover your bills, but to give you their entire fortune, expecting nothing in return. How would you respond?

A healthy response to such a ridiculous situation is to refuse the gift. It is far too much, the responsibility is far too great, and you will always feel as if you are deeply indebted to the person in such a way that you will never be able to repay. But this is precisely the wrong way to respond to a gift; someone does not give a gift expecting that you pay for it. It is given to you from a place of charity, love, appreciation, or any other type of affection. The size of the gift does not matter if the giver determines to give it to you fully. Our proper response to a gift of unfathomable proportion is to first see it as what it is - a gift. It is now ours, because the giver determined it to be so. However, we should not be content with treating such an incredible gift with apathy or nonchalance. We need to make sure the gift is put to good use and is shared with those who might be blessed by it other than ourselves. The history of the Catholic Church is rife with saints who took God’s gift to them, namely salvation, and multiplied it in such a way that saved countless souls apart from their own. But there is no saint in our history who more embodied the appreciation and acceptance of the ultimate unpayable gift than St. Therese of the Child Jesus. In her perfect childlike innocence, Therese had absolutely no doubt of her salvation; this makes no sense to those of us who are well-aware of our sins and for those of us who are in a constant struggle to seek holiness. But Therese was a sinner just like us; the only difference is that she actually accepted the gift that was given to her by her Heavenly Father with no doubt that it was given out of pure love. She never became complacent with this certainty, though; she “paid back” her gift by giving God exactly what He wants from all of us: a complete and undying reciprocation of His divine love. Because of this, the very young and relatively unknown Therese became the greatest saint of modernity, one of the greatest saints in our history, and was given the very rare title of Doctor of the Church.

Our role as recipients of the greatest gift is to recognize the love with which God grants us our salvation. Consider the words of Job in this passage as an expression of this recognition: God can do all things, including offering us salvation, and there will be nothing that stops Him. The way He works is a mystery to us now, but if we trust in Him and are certain that He knows why He is giving us a way out of our sin, we will be satisfied beyond our wildest imagination. Our acceptance of His gift begins with repentance and turning away from sin. From that point, we are called to look at St. Therese as a model of accepting God’s graces. Be certain of your salvation as she was, but be absolutely faithful in your own gratitude to God. Turn away from all sin, and bask in the love that God wraps around you with His graces.