Prologue

This is not a new explanation for suffering, and it is especially not a comfortable one. The book it walks through is the one in the Bible most likely to take a careful reader who loves God and leave them, for a while, not sure they do — and any honest treatment of it has to say that at the door rather than at the end. Job is where the gentle teaching most of us were handed about trials and hard seasons goes to break. If you have ever been told that your suffering is a furnace refining you, that it is all working toward your good, that God will not give you more than you can handle, and you have then read the book of Job slowly, you may already know the particular vertigo this book is about. The man in it did nothing to deserve what fell on him — the text says so twice, once in the narrator's voice and once in God's own — and he was never, inside his suffering, told why.

This book is not going to fix that by telling you why. It is going to do something harder and, I have come to believe, truer: it is going to refuse to fill the silence the book of Job deliberately leaves, and show you that the silence is not a flaw in the book of Job but the very thing that book is about.

I came at this the same way I came at the road in the books before this one. I had been handed the comfortable teaching, the way every churchgoing person is handed it, and it served well enough for ordinary hard things. Then I read Job — really read it, with the blamelessness in chapter one held in one hand and the dead children held in the other — and the teaching did not survive the reading. So I went back and read the whole book the way I have learned to read everything else: slowly, with the text open, asking what it actually says before asking what I had always been told it says. What follows is what I found. Not all of it. The part that holds together, and holds weight, which is a higher bar for a book about suffering than for a book about almost anything else, because a reader in real pain will lean their whole self on it.

So the same rule before you sit down. None of this is owed your belief; all of it is owed your testing. Read with the book of Job open beside this one. Where what is written here holds against the text, you will not be trusting me — you will be seeing it yourself, which is the only kind of seeing that survives a night when the comfortable answers have all failed you. And where it does not hold, the text wins, and you should drop the line that failed and keep reading. That is not modesty. It is the only honest way to hand a hurting person a book on this subject, because the wrong kind of confidence here does real harm.

One honesty owed at the door, because this subject carries it more than most. A book on the suffering of the righteous can be written in two ways that both miss. It can be written to comfort at any cost — supplying the reason the text withholds, finding the hidden flaw, quietly convicting the innocent, balancing the books so that every loss turns out deserved or at least repaid, and sending the sufferer back out with a tidy account of why it all happened to them. That is the way that turns, in the end, into the friends of Job — the men who had an answer for everything and whom God rebukes at the close for not speaking rightly of Him. Or it can be written to despair — letting the silence prove God absent or cruel, treating the unanswered loss as the last word, walking out of Job the way many readers do, with the suffering intact and God lost. The first lies to relieve the pressure. The second lets the pressure crush. The book of Job walks between them, and so this book tries to: holding the loss exactly as unbearable and exactly as unexplained as the text insists, and finding that what the text finally offers in place of an explanation is not nothing — it is, in fact, more than the explanation would have been, though it is not reached by hurrying, and this book will make you wait for it the way Job was made to wait.

A word on the shape of what follows. The first movements walk into the suffering — the comfortable teaching and why Job breaks it, the blameless man and why his innocence ruins every easy account, the courtroom where a question was asked about him that he was never told, and the losses honestly counted, including the ones the text never restores. The middle movements sit in it — the friends and their relentless, reasonable, wrong comfort; the one younger voice who comes closest and still misses; the rage Job flung straight up at heaven, and what God said about it at the end; and the thing he reached for from the ash heap when there was nothing left to hold. Then the storm, where God arrives and answers without explaining. And then the far movements, where the road turns toward what this suffering was, and where the silence that broke so many readers turns out not to be the last word. Suffering walked into, sat in, and finally walked out the other side of — not by being explained, but by being entered.

A word, too, on where this book sits. It stands on its own; you need nothing but the book of Job open beside it to read every page. But it belongs to a series, each volume tracing one stretch of the same long arc — the whole of Scripture read through the One who keeps stepping into it to make Himself known. This particular volume leans, more than on any other, on the one before it about the adversary — because the courtroom Job's trial opens in is the same courtroom that book walked at length, and the figure who asks the question that costs Job everything is the figure that book traced from the first page of the Hebrew Bible to the cross. You will meet that figure here too, but only as the backdrop he is in Job; this book will teach you what you need of him as it goes, and never make your understanding wait on the other volume. If, when you have finished, you want him worked out in full — the function before the name, the leash, the defeat already accomplished — that book is there. Here, he is only the voice in the court, and the eye is on the man on trial.

It is written to be read slowly. A movement at a time, the way a person actually reads a thing they are leaning on rather than skimming. It does not assume you have settled the questions it asks. It assumes you have been carrying them — about why a good man suffers, about why God would say yes to any of it, about whether your own losses might be the same kind of thing, about where the love of God is when the explanation never comes — and that the simplest thing is the thing most worth doing: open the text yourself, slowly, and sit with what it actually says before reaching for what you were always told it meant.

You can. That is the whole reason this exists.

It does not start in the ashes. It starts, strangely, with the teaching that was supposed to keep you out of them — the comfortable thing said in every hospital hallway, which is true often enough that we never test it, until the day it is handed to someone for whom it is not true at all.

A PRAYER

Father, this is my prayer for whoever holds this and is about to begin:

open their eyes, and open their heart.

Some who read this are already in the ashes.

Be nearer to them than this book can be,

and let it not lie to them, even to comfort them.

Keep them from the answer that is too small,

and from the despair that says there is no answer at all.

And if that is you, pray the rest with me —

Father, open my eyes. Open my heart.

Sit with me in what I cannot explain,

and show me, when I am ready to see it,

the One who sat down in it first.