My Friend, Job

It did not arrive with a trumpet blast.
No chariot of blaze, no smoldering sky,
no angel swinging a blade over the entry-sill.

It was quieter.

It was her standing at the sink,
not rinsing the plate, just watching the water run.
It was the slow erosion of touch,
a forgetting.

Like a name dissolving in the rain.

I should have seen it then
the way she blinked slow,
like a sleeper adjusting to a new dream.
The way her hands, once so certain,
drifted over the table, unsure where to land.
The way she spoke,
measured, like a doctor delivering a bad scan.

“I don’t think I love you anymore.”

And somewhere,
somewhere very far away,
a servant ran, kicking grit,
panting, reaching Job’s door,
falling at his feet.

“Your oxen – gone.”

Another, winded, voice cracking
“Your servants – slaughtered.”

Another, wild-eyed, frantic
“blaze, from the sky”

Another, last, worst
“Your children…”

The world tilting,
the knees buckling,
the roar of something breaking
too large to comprehend.


I slept in my car that night.
Streetlight flickering, engine off,
vapor fogging the windshield.

I told myself I wouldn’t cry.

Job sat in the dirt.
His body was an anatomy lesson in grief.
Flesh flaking, sores cracked wide,
flies fat with the feast of him.

His wife stood over him,
bare arms crossed,
hair wind-knotted.
She had kissed his eyelids once.
She had held his face with both hands.
Now her mouth was a hinge swinging loose.

“Curse God and die.”

And I
I wanted to.
To spit it back at the sky,
to take the pneuma He had given and
hurl it into the dirt.
To call it cruelty,
to call it mockery,
to call it what it felt like:

A fist through the ribs.

But I didn’t.
And neither did Job.

He dug his fingers into the grit,
shook, opened his mouth,
and what came out was absurd

“Shall we take what is sweet and refuse what is bitter?”


My friends told me I was lucky.
Lucky she hadn’t cheated.
Lucky she had the decency to say it straight.
Lucky she wasn’t drawing blood in the courts.

“Maybe you weren’t affectionate enough.”
“Maybe she just fell out of love.”
“Maybe you should move on.”

Their words flaked off my skin like dead leaves.

Job’s friends were worse.
They sat with him in the waste,
counted his boils,
noted the way his fingers trembled,
tilted their heads like surgeons inspecting
a patient beyond saving.

Then, at last, they spoke.

“Surely you deserved this.”
“Surely the blameless do not rot in the grit.”
“Surely you have done something to earn your ruin.”

They did not say,
“Maybe you weren’t affectionate enough.”
But they meant it.

Job spat blood and told them off.

“Tell me what sin I have hidden,”
he said, his voice like a rasp on dried pine sap.
“Show me where my hands are red.”

They said nothing.
Only let the freight of their clean robes
say it for them.


The storm did not knock first.

It did not ask if Job was ready,
if he had caught his breath,
if his skin had finished sealing itself back together.

It split the sky.
Peeled the earth from the soles of his feet.

“Who darkens My counsel with empty words?”

My lungs locked in my chest.

“Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Did you chart the hollows where the sea crouches?
Did you stitch the beam to the morning?
Did you teach the lion the freight of his hunger?”

The wind roared in my mouth,
filled my lungs with blaze,
cracked me open, hollowed me out.

“Speak, then. Answer Me.”

I had nothing.
No courtroom speech, no argument,
nothing but the memory of her
standing at the sink,
watching the water run.

Did I love her enough?
Did I hold her right?
Did I lose her by inches,
or was she gone all at once?

Did I…
Did I…

Had I sat at the seam of the universe?
Had I seen the invisible threads
weaving and unweaving
where I could not touch?

Had I stood in the dark
where the first word was spoken?

Had I built anything
that would not break?


Job pressed his forehead to the ground.
Put his hand over his mouth.

And I
I sat in the car,
hands gripping the wheel,
throb rattling like a matchstick in a bottle.

I have spoken of things too great for me.
I have cursed what I did not understand.
I have tried to claw my way
out of the storm.

But the wind is still blowing.
And I am still breathing.

That means something.

Somewhere in the wreckage,
I still have something to fight for.
Maybe it’s her.
Maybe it’s my children.
Maybe it’s just waking up tomorrow
and not giving in to the freight in my bones.

Maybe it’s standing in the grit,
lifting my eyes,
and whispering

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”

Maybe…

that will be enough.