In a recent magazine article,[1] the concluding sentence read: “In a world where trouble and temptations seem to find us so easily, it is reassuring to know that our greatest source of strength [our Heavenly Father] is so easy to find.”
This may be true—sometimes. And maybe, dear reader, your experience (or unwavering belief) is that He is always so. But from my experience, from my study and witness (and the déjà vu) of the lives and writings of many, God has NOT been so easy to find—or perhaps more accurately, to re-find.[2]
In the trenches of life, countless striving people endure an excruciating path of seeking to find God in the midst of His extended silences; His apparent contradictions; His seeming abandonments; His apparent deafness to fervent prayers and priesthood promises; His tendency to inflict[3] Job-like challenges upon His children.
Why does He NOT, in this “game of life,” always manifest the easy-to-find presence idealized in the article? Is it to prove us—to see if we will choose good and God in the midst of inexplicable pain, confusion, and “every excuse and temptation” to do otherwise?[4] Is it to test our endurance in seeking Him with all our heart, might, mind, and strength? Is it to bring us to wisdom and divine priorities through suffering?
Of course, God wants us to find Him. But if finding Him were so easy, where would be the trial—the proving—that is integral to the Plan; each according to need? Yes, sometimes, God will pursue us and be amazingly easy to find. But MORE times, I believe, He will require us to pursue Him through mists of darkness till we are exhausted and sometimes, almost hopeless, like Job.[5]
I believe God works along a continuum of possibilities—again, each according to need. God said we should expect opposition in all things,[6] so why not opposition to the way we perceive Him and the ways we expect Him to be and to bless?
What I find painful about latter-day variations of the comfort Job had to endure from his friends—is how alienating such “comfort” remains. Already, many of us feel too frequently estranged from our oft-silent God and confused by contraries and unfulfilled promises and expectations. Then, as we seek for understanding and peace, we encounter voices that seem to say, “You do not rightly feel what you feel. You do not truthfully experience what you experience, because that is not how God is.” Job’s friends were confident in their fervent defense of the character and ways of God, but surprisingly, God did not come to their defense. Rather, Job’s passionate swings between testimony, railings, questions, and accusations proved more acceptable.[7]
If only we could get to the point of pondering the ENTIRE book of Job and acknowledging not just his enduring testimony,[8] but also his heartbreaking questions, struggles, terrors, and confusions![9] And admitting as well, our own unfortunate tendencies to recycle as “gospel truths” the unhelpful convictions of Job’s friends. How much comfort, understanding, and compassion do we forfeit for ourselves and deny to others when we reference only a minutia of Job’s story and acknowledge only a fraction of God’s ways and means?
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[1] “I Will Be Found of You” by Aaron L. West, Ensign, January 2010:80
[2] In some instances, finding God may indeed come in easy, transcendent ways, such as for many new seekers in search of His path; or when He goes in search of lost lambs (those who have left the fold). But for those who have made commitment to His path, the finding and re-finding of God in daily struggles and longings is seldom an exercise in ease. I also know that for me, seeing God is not the same as finding God. I can see God in nature, in the faces of children, in the compassion of good people, even in the survival of so many sinners who seem sustained for the chance that they might repent (which includes most of us); but many times, I cannot seem to find God in the translations and explanations of men. I wonder if God tires of us always trying to translate Him and our lives into tidy explanations when what He really wants is not our translations, but our transformation.
[3] Book of Mormon, Mosiah 3:19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father (emphasis added).
[4] Pearl of Great Price, Abraham 3:24-25 ... We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; (emphasis added); Doctrine and Covenants, Section 98:12, 14 … I will try you and prove you herewith. … for I have decreed in my heart, saith the Lord, that I will prove you in all things, whether you will abide in my covenant, even unto death, that you may be found worthy (emphasis added).
[5] Old Testament, Job 19:10 He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree.
[6] Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, ..., righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; …
[7] Old Testament, Job 42:7 And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.
[8] For example, see magazine notes to “Judgments of Job” by Joseph Brickey on the inside front cover, Ensign, January 2010
[9] “I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Old Testament, Job 7:11); “I am full of confusion” (10:15); accused God of breaking him with a tempest and multiplying his wounds without cause (9:17), of being cruel to him (30:21); charged God with removing his hope like a tree [tearing it up by the roots?] (19:10); stood up to God and demanded to be judged in truth and justice (chp. 31); suffered immense despair (6:2-4) and terrifying dreams (7:14) and railed against his own birth (3:11).
