Job's Comforters

So there you are in the middle of one of life’s train-wrecks–dazed, wounded, wondering what shoe–or bomb–will drop next, and up walks Job’s comforter.

You may remember Job from the Bible. A rich, powerful man, a great father and good in every way was Job ...So there you are in the middle of one of life’s train-wrecks–dazed, wounded, wondering what shoe–or bomb–will drop next, and up walks Job’s comforter.

You may remember Job from the Bible. A rich, powerful man, a great father and good in every way was Job (pronounced like Joe with a “b” on the end). Then, in a series of overlapping cataclysms, he lost everything and everybody except his wife–who turned out to be a whole lot less than supportive in her changed circumstances. And Job ends up sitting alone on a pile of dirt, scratching his boil-covered body with some broken pottery.

We can identify with old Job. Life drags us through some tough, tough patches, times of loss that make us feel every bit like Job Redux. Caught in an undertow of pain and wondering if we’ll ever make it to safety.

And, ho boy, do we recognize Job’s so-called friends who showed up to supposedly offer support and comfort. As they sat with Job in his misery, they took turns playing a self-centered, self-righteous, can-you-top-this game of assuring Job that every bit of his disaster had to be his own fault. They weren’t sure how or why because Job seemed so upright, but deep down, they insisted, he couldn’t be all he pretended to be.

This is familiar territory. Your spouse dumps you like a bag of wet garbage; friends can only imagine what you did to deserve that. You get fired, and friends smirk knowingly when you try to explain the political nature of the event. Your child gets into difficulty–well, you the kind of comfort you’ll get from friends about that. It probably started sometime during potty training.

Yet, from the Bible story, it’s clear that Job was completely innocent. Dreadful things do happen to completely innocent people, good people. Because of their presumption of Job’s guilt, history awarded his friends–and their attitudinal heirs–the label, “Job’s comforters,” so-called friends who add to a suffering person’s anguish by piling on false charges of liability and guilt.

You may never have met anybody like Job, but you’ve met his comforters on more than one occasion. They seem to be everywhere.

We can charge some of it off to jealousy. Job had everything a person could dream of wanting–and then some–so jealousy was never more than a stone’s throw away. The green-eyed monster is a little more subtle with people living everyday, typical lives, but jealousy doesn’t need much ground to take root and grow with vigor.

But we should never dismiss fear. If bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them, they could happen to anybody, including me. If I don’t want bad things to happen to me, and who does, I have to persuade myself and everybody around that the victim’s actions caused the problem. If blame can be assigned, then I’ll be safe as long as I’m good.

In other words, if I can claim that the cause of your problem is something you do that I don’t do, then what happened to you can’t happen to me. There is, of course, no logic to this, but it brings some shaky comfort to fearful hearts.

We see this thinking at work when people stare numbly at misfortune and ask, “What did I do to deserve this?” Sometimes the answer is, “nothing.”

The real question is what to do when life has just pummeled us a good one, and Job’s comforters show up at our door. Nobody says we have to let them in. And certainly nobody says we have to entertain them. And, most positively, nobody says we have to believe them.

We can sort out the who’s-to-blame-for-what stuff after we get some solid ground under our feet and a little zip back into our lives. That kind of review helps us keep history from repeating itself. But we still won’t want Job’s comforters anywhere around; we’ll want people who care.

© Copyright 2007 by Bette Dowdell. All rights reserved.