Job and the Mystery of Suffering

Saturday, August 8, 2026

Sunday

Ultimately Job’s story reveals that God cannot really be known through theology, the law, or common sense. God can only be related to and known through relationship.

—Richard Rohr

Monday

I am convinced that people who do not feel deeply finally do not know deeply either. It is only because Job is willing to feel his emotions that he is able to come to grips with the mystery of suffering in his head and heart and gut. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday

Silence pushes Job to challenge God. When Job finds words at last, he demands steadily that God enter the abyss of loss and be revealed to him there. —Ellen F. Davis

Wednesday

If God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. —Harold S. Kushner

Thursday

[Job], your story truly gives me hope. It gives me the feeling that while man lives on the earth, there is no guarantee that he will not suffer, however innocent or righteous he may be.

—Gregorio Nsomboro

Friday

No book is less an answer book to the question of suffering than the book of Job. It fixes nothing, explains nothing, and dismisses those who even try to explain, yet the story of Job realigns and regenerates the soul in ways that few books can.

—Richard Rohr

Week Thirty-One Practice: The Heart: A Reservoir of Joy

When a friend suffered an unexpected loss, cancer survivor Kate Bowler offered her a paradoxical message of suffering and joy:

I wanted to give her a promise that reasonable people would be too reluctant to guarantee, but it is one I would hang my life on: You will never be cured of this grief, it’s true. But you will be joyful, anyway. I swear.

When a loss of any kind—breakup, breakdown, or any terrible undoing—descends upon your life, joy seems to vanish.… Laughter feels strange and a sense of ease is a distant memory.

In this new reality, even the smallest spark of joy seems impossible to ignite. And even worse, suggested the nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, joy becomes the source of suffering. Its memory stokes the fires of hurt.

The joy we once had, the joy we remember, becomes our ruin…. When you are in the deep abyss of grief, sadness, or worst of all, despair, joy feels like an insult….

But I know about the joy that persists, even though it might seem like temporary insanity.

I looked at my friend … and I could see how impossible joy felt to her. In fact, not long ago, I would not have believed in joy either.

It’s strange to say it like that—but I believe in joy. We can’t mistake it for anything less than what it is: one of the most powerful ways we experience the deepest and most healing forms of gratitude, delight, and hope.

It is a kind of transcendence; joy is a glimmer of love and forgiveness and wholeness that lifts us out of reality for a moment and gives us back to ourselves, anew….

In the many chambers of our beating hearts are reservoirs for joy.

“You will hear the music,” I said to my friend. “I swear you will hear the music.”