Meaning of Life: Session 2

The second session of 3. Let’s continue on the journey of discovering the meaning of life!

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Session Text

Knowing the Purpose of Life

Yesterday we reflected that I’m not just a passive recipient or victim to just live a life as my circumstances dictate. I’m the agent of making an intentional decision for my life. This story is not just being written, but I am also in a way with the help of God, the author of the story of my unique story that my life will write. Every single thing that is happening in your life, every single event, every single emotion that you feel are not just random things or meaningless things. I believe that they gathered together to create a stream of the river and in that way, we see the direction of our life. The purpose of our life.

Yesterday Laila came to me and asked me a question. Laila, you’re a new person but you’re always welcome to ask questions. She felt awkward too. Linda is from Ottawa, but Laila is from London. Laila asked me about the purpose and meaning of life, are they the same thing? Very, very good question. So I said the purpose is something that is a part of the meaning of life but it’s not everything. As you live your life, then clearly you see the direction of your life and then you see the kind of end. So that’s a purpose. The end too. So the direction is set. So you’re not choosing arbitrarily the purpose, “Okay, this is the purpose in my life. I’m going to live like this.” No, that’s not what you do. As you see, you see your purpose in life being unravelled to you. So you see and you follow it. So she said, “So, in the middle of it, we just live it?” No, we don’t just live it. We live it, but you open your eyes, so you see every single detail that is happening in your life and you see how they work together to build.

Yesterday I was going to drive up here because on Sunday – tomorrow, I have to go back down to the church to preach. So I was going to drive up, but I was so tired. As you get older, over 50, you tend to fall asleep behind the wheel. So I was kind of scared and then Jane kindly offered, “You know Pastor, why don’t you just come up here and then you can go down. Grace can take other peoples in a ride and all that.” So I came up. So driving and she asked me, “Okay, 404…” we were on the express, “Does this take you to 404?” So I said, “Okay yeah, both collector and express, they both take you to 404 so you can just stay here and then, uh, you don’t have to, uh, um,” and I kind of fell asleep, right? And after a while, I felt strange and I looked at, looked out and saw Kennedy. “Where are we?” She said, “But you said you don’t have to take 404, you just go all the way.” She misunderstood me. “Aw, Kennedy. Oh no!”

“So okay, now we gotta go out…” and we got off at Markham. It’s like that, life. You know, if you don’t see your option, you don’t need to think about it. You can just live. Without knowing where you’re going, if life is a journey, maybe you may end up with a place where you don’t want to be, ultimately. So it is very important that you need to pay attention to what is going on in your life – daily or weekly or monthly or yearly. You need to think about where you’re going and that set the pattern instead of letting the circumstances dictate and guide you to where you don’t want to go. That’s what I’m saying. You don’t want circumstances to take you where you don’t want to go. You want to go where you want to go. That’s what we need to do.

Life Continuously Evolves

You know, some people after living so many years tell me that, “I feel like I’m being robbed of my life.” After so many years they tell me, “I feel like I’m robbed of my life.” You don’t want to do that. You want to make an intentional choice every moment. So that’s what we have been talking about yesterday. The meaning of life, it’s not something outside of you. It’s out there somewhere so I go and find it. The meaning of life is shaped in me. It’s not something other people can give to me. If you come to me and say, “Mok-san-nim (Pastor), what is my meaning of life?” “Okay. This is your meaning of life, live it like this.” Ethically wrong, that is ethically wrong. If I do that, no matter how powerful I may be, how spiritual I may be, that’s ethically wrong to do so. But I see that happening in lots of places. Even to my kids, I cannot say that this is your meaning of life, you got to do this. I can’t do that.

“Oh, you got to be a doctor” or “You’re going to be a lawyer.” Who said that that’s a meaning of life for that person? I don’t think even parents have that right to do so with their children. It is something that is being made, being shaped, and being formed. It is important that you understand it, that you know it. Over the years, it will be slowly revealing itself to you. Yesterday, so we did ‘meaning of life – life itself has a pattern of the story’ and we examined some stories in the Bible. The Bible never defines what life is. I’m really glad that the Bible never defined life because once you define something, that’s the end. Closure. It’s closed. But the Bible never defines. Life is not something that you can close. Life is something – until you die – it continuously evolves. There’s a process continuously and it unravels itself.

Unique Stories

The Bible talks about life in a story form. Because the story continues, I think the Bible is so profound. That’s why I love the Bible. I love the Bible because it has so much wisdom, so many secrets, so much truth in it. We examined three stories and then we realized that they’re all different stories. Abraham’s story is radically different from Jacob’s story, and Jacob’s story is radically from Joseph’s story. So each person has a unique story and it’s unique like all yours. All of your stories are unique stories.

Last night I heard that you had a good sharing. Some of you stayed up here until 1:30 and ate up four boxes of ramen. We got only six boxes left now, hurry up. I hope that this community is a place where we all come and share our life, without having to be so religious. Without having to express that you’re so religious. That’s a pseudo-community. I want a real community. Sharing of your shattered experiences, broken experiences. Just be who you are. If you’re struggling with God, that’s fine. If you’re struggling with your faith, that’s all right. That’s all part of the process. You don’t need to pretend to be somebody to be able to share. We all, if we can all share your stories, then together we can build an authentic community and that authentic community will have a powerful influence on you and on your children. This morning, I had a little time to talk with John Chung and I said, “You know, a first-generation community that they built – I mean I love the first generation all that, but I’m not very proud of the community that they’ve built. I’m not 100 percent really satisfied with the community they built, because the second generation cannot take it on. Somehow they built their own very unique special community for themselves. It is not something the second generation can take on.” But our church is unique because you’re the pioneer. I don’t see many second-generation communities around, even in Toronto or in North America. I went down to Hawaii and met all the second generation ministers, but there are not many second-generation communities. You are the pioneers. You are building up a community. I hope that you build an authentic community, not a pseudo-community. Where everybody is welcome and everybody can share their stories. Then you’ll be powerful and you will help your children. Once you build it, they can take it on. Build some kind of community where your children can also take on.

From Bondage to Freedom

Anyway, now, these stories – every one of you has a different story, and in the Bible, there are many different stories, but I discovered that there is one common thread. There’s one common thread that I found in all these stories – your stories, Bible stories – and the one common thread is that all our stories move from bondage to freedom. That’s what I discovered. That’s what I found. All our stories move from bondage to freedom. Abraham’s story, Jacob’s story, Joseph’s story, they all moved from bondage to freedom. From the bondage of fear to the freedom of courage, the bondage of hatred to the freedom of love and forgiveness, from the bondage of greed to the freedom of self-sacrifices.

Our stories also moved from bondage to freedom, with the help of God’s grace. But, another thing that I discovered was that this is the movement of the story, but in-between, there is suffering. The story from bondage to freedom is not a free ride. To move from bondage to freedom, you have to go through the reality of suffering. For example, Israelites, they were in Egypt and then Moses led them out of Egypt. Egypt represented what? Bondage. They were slaves there. They were moving out of bondage to the promised land. That’s the Book of Exodus. To move from Egypt to the promised land, in-between, what was there? Wilderness. There was a wilderness. In other words, you will all go through a time of wilderness in your life. You cannot just enter into the promised land. I’m going to Israel this Fall. Palestine, Israel. But I heard that it takes only like a week or 10 days to go from Egypt to the promised land, but how long did it take? Forty years. Forty years of suffering. So if you think that you can have faith just like that, no.

Faith is something that is resulted after many, many years of disappointments, hardships, confusion, and all these things you go through, and after that, you enter into the world of faith. If you just grab it, it may be pseudo-faith. Be careful with that kind of faith. With pseudo-faith, be careful, because pseudo-faith will never liberate you. Pseudo faith will never take you to the promised land. It has to be real faith. The real faith, always in that life, there is suffering. Suffering is indispensable then, to find a meaning in life.

You don’t need to choose, “Okay, then should I choose always, do I have to choose to suffer?” No, you don’t need to choose because without your choice suffering will come to you. You are inescapable from suffering. The most common experience of human beings is not happiness, unfortunately, but suffering. The universal experience of human beings is suffering. Each family has its own suffering. Every person, regardless of age, experiences, some kind of suffering they go through. So when you describe human beings, if you take our suffering, then you’re not giving the full picture of human beings. What human beings truly are like. To be fully human is to experience suffering. In Christianity, we believe that God became a human being, and we call it incarnation. When God decided to become a human being, what was the one characteristic that God chose, that characteristic is suffering. The cross is a symbol of that. Jesus Christ took the suffering, as the face of a human being.

Gospel Mark describes it best. In the gospel of Mark, you find Jesus as the suffering servant. In Mark, Jesus kept emphasizing that I’m going to have to suffer. Every time he gathers disciples he says, “I’m going to have to suffer,” and all that. And then they all didn’t like it, “No, don’t do that.” They were interested in glory. They were interested in power. But suffering? Don’t talk about it. But every time Jesus performed miracles, he said, “I have to be delivered and I will suffer” and all that. They didn’t like it. Then Jesus asked Peter, “Who do people say that I am?” “Oh, Elijah and all that stuff.” Then he asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter says, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” He answered it right, and after that, he said, “the son of God has to suffer” and all that. And Peter said, “No, no, no, no…” When you look at the Bible, very interesting. Peter used the word “rebuke”. Peter rebuked Jesus, “Don’t say things like that. Right now the atmosphere’s so good, just lead them and let’s take over the Romans. Everybody’s excited about your message, everybody’s excited about you, so let’s go.” But Jesus said, “I have to suffer.” “Don’t say that wimpy stuff, you’re not going to suffer. You’re going to win.” And Jesus said, “Satan, get behind me.” So he got really rebuked by Jesus, “Satan, behind me.”

Perspective on Suffering

See, Jesus cannot do his ministry without suffering. Because suffering is a very core element of what a human being is like. Jesus Christ did not see suffering as a result of sin. Many times we think that suffering is a result of sin, but Jesus Christ had a different perspective on suffering. When he was walking with the disciples, and they met a born-blind man, and then the disciples asked what question, what did they ask? “Whose sin is this? Is it his sin or his parents’ sin?” Jesus said, “No one’s sin. This is to glorify God.” Glorifying God, ultimately he healed the man. Glorifying God means from bondage to freedom, from the bondage of blindness to the freedom of being able to see. Jesus Christ did not see suffering necessarily as a result of sin.

Actually, Douglas John Hall, who’s a Canadian theologian who is teaching in Montreal at McGill. He said there were at least four different kinds of suffering, right from the beginning in creation. First, the suffering of loneliness. God created all things, and what did he say? “It is good.” But when he saw Adam, what did he say? “It is not good for him to be alone.” So from the beginning, there was evidence of suffering, of loneliness. Second, the suffering of one’s own limitations. They all had to live with their own limitations. You know, one’s experiencing one’s limitation is hard to bear. We all struggle with that. At the job, whatever we do, especially men at the golf course, you’ll experience a lot of limitations. If you go a lot you will learn about life. Suffer. Why do you pay to suffer? Interesting paradox. Third, the suffering of temptation. From the serpent, the first human beings experience the suffering of temptation. Jesus also experienced the suffering of temptation. Fourth, the suffering of fear. As a matter of fact, the first word human beings spoke to God was a message of fear. This is what he said: “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid.” That first phrase, human beings ever spoke to God, and they are expressing their fear. So all of these fears were there.

Pain is Part of Human Life

The suffering has always been with human beings right from the beginning until now. So when suffering comes to you, don’t treat them as though an unexpected or uninvited guests came to you because suffering will inevitably come to you. There are a lot of people suffering around me, suffering from financial problems. I mean, a lot of people come to me and then tell me about their suffering. Some people have real problems with children, a kind of tough life their children go through. Suffering from illness, he’s only two years older than me and he just got lung cancer, and so he’s getting chemotherapy right now. Suffering from political oppression, from broken relationships, from one’s own lack of capability, limitations, and difficult problems. From one’s own mistakes, the gravest sin who’s resulting cannot be undone. So from all these things, people suffer. If you are trying to achieve happiness without considering seriously the reality of suffering, it won’t be true happiness.

There’s a movie called Shadow Lands. How many people saw that? Good, yeah. Shadow Lands describes the life of C.S. Lewis. You know C.S. Lewis. He was an atheist at first. He was a professor at Oxford University, but after he was converted he wrote many good Christian books. Some of you probably know some of his books. What was his book? Mere Christianity or Narnia is a children’s story. All good books that he wrote. Then he married Joy Gresham. Joy a was a divorcee from the United States and she came to London and married him. All his life, he was just a scholar living in an ivory tower. But soon after marriage, they discovered that she had cancer. In the late age, they weren’t married for many years, just a few years while taking care of her. He experienced what it meant to truly love somebody.

But at the same time, he also experienced how painful that is to love somebody. Cancer really got worse. So once they went to their favourite spot in Hertfordshire in England – a beautiful rural area. Louis really enjoyed the moment there. This is what he said to Joy, his wife: “This is my kind of happiness. When the present moment is entirely self-contained, untarnished by any fleeting thoughts of what has gone before or what may come later.” He really enjoyed that moment. Then Joy, his wife, gently rebuked him, saying, “That’s only temporal isolationism. The happiness cannot be genuine if it involves shutting off the past or the future. What is yet to come in the future infuses the very texture of what is now experienced. The pain then is part of this happiness now. That’s the deal.” And she died. Happiness cannot be contained in one good moment. That’s temporal isolationism. After her funeral, Lewis said, “A child chooses safety, but a grown person,” I used inclusive language, he said, “A grown man chooses to suffer. The pain is part of the happiness. Now I find I can live with the pain after all.” That’s the deal.

Pain is a part of happiness. Pain is a part of human life. Jesus came to this world not to get rid of suffering or pain. Jesus did not come to this world to give us a painkiller, but I see many people try to use Christian faith only as a painkiller. Whenever they are suffering, they go to church and get comforted just for the moment. Then they need stronger and stronger dosage of that painkiller. That’s why Karl Marx said, “Religion is opium.”

Avoiding Suffering

Jesus Christ did not come to take us out of the world of suffering. We can see that in Jesus’ last prayer. This was Jesus’ last prayer: “I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but I asked you to protect them from the evil one.” Jesus did not come to take us out of the world, but to protect us from the evil one. Jesus did not say, “My children, since I’m with you, you’ll have no pain anymore.” Jesus didn’t say that. Jesus said rather, “In the world, you may have tribulation.” Tribulation is worse suffering. But he said, “In the world, you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer.” Be of good cheer, meaning have courage. You will have suffering but have courage. But we human beings are not courageous when it comes to suffering. We are not courageous when we face our suffering, we try our best to avoid suffering as much as possible, and if the suffering is inevitable, we wish that that suffering would go away as soon as possible.

That’s all we want. We feel so helpless and powerless when it comes to our suffering. We only fear our suffering. We’re only thinking of running away from our own suffering, and our life becomes so passive and meaningless. Also, when the suffering comes, not only do we try to avoid it, but we try to find a scapegoat – someone to blame. Don’t we do that? When we go through suffering, “Ugh, if my parents sent me to this university or that university.” Or if you’re fighting, “Ugh, if I didn’t meet that woman or that man.” So when suffering comes, we always tend to blame somebody. When Japanese cars first came to the United States, many American motor factories had to close their doors. There was a Chrysler Factory in Detroit that had to be shut down. Ronald Evans was a supervisor at one of those factories and got laid off. On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin had a bachelor party and on the way home he dropped by at McDonald’s, and Ronald Evans and his stepson approached Vincent and the stepson grabbed him from behind and Ronald beat Vincent to death with a baseball bat. And he said, “Because of you, Jap, we lost our job.” Vincent was not even Japanese. He was Chinese. Chin is not a Japanese last name.

Sometimes we try to find somebody to blame for our suffering. We’re not bold and courageous with our suffering. So one, we run into fantasy. Two, we blame somebody. Three, none of that works, then we fall into despair and bitterness. That’s what we do. We are not of good cheer. The worst feeling of suffering, you know what that is? The worst of all the suffering is the feeling that God has abandoned you. That’s the worst feeling of suffering. All another suffering, yeah we can handle, but if you feel that God does not love you any more or God has abandoned you, that is the worst feeling of suffering. That’s why Jesus Christ experienced the worst feeling of suffering on the cross. What did he say? “My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?” That’s the worst feeling of suffering and our Lord Jesus Christ experienced that.

Job’s Suffering

The Bible is a story, and then to talk about suffering, the Bible gives us another story, and that story is the story of who? Job. Job is the classic example of suffering, but I believe that there is a message that God wants to get across through the story of the life of Job. Some of you probably know, but how many of you never heard of Job?

Job lived all his life with so many of God’s blessings. He had many children and they were all good and he was rich and healthy and he was even righteous before God. He was almost an ideal person. People wish that that was the end of Job’s life and he lived happily ever after. That’s not the story of the Bible. It’s a story of a fairy tale, but the Bible story doesn’t end in that way. He didn’t live happily ever after, that was not the case. The Satan challenged God. Here the Satan is not the devil, Satan does not refer to the Devil. It means, DA or prosecutor. It says “The” Satan, so DA or prosecutor. The Satan challenged God saying that Job is loyal to you, not for no reason. The reason he’s loyal to you is that in Job’s mind, implicitly he believes that his loyalty will guarantee his blessings. It is Job’s careful calculation, he said.

The challenge is that human beings worship God for what they receive from God. Not for who He is. It’s not pure love between God and human beings. The reason human beings are good is that they are scared of God’s punishment or because they are expecting God reward, that’s all. All they want is to either avoid your punishment or expecting your reward. That’s why they worship you, not for who You simply are. That’s the challenge. So this whole story of Job is a challenge to the traditional view of life. What is the traditional view of life? I think the writer of Job is a radical person. He turned upside down the traditional logic that God blesses those who are good to him. Wow that’s amazing, that’s how most people think – God blesses those who are good to him. The story of Job challenges that. Job, even though he was good, experienced tremendous suffering. It is hard to accept the story of Job and the message of Job. Even though it is in the Bible, you wish that it never happens to you. You wish that the Satan never tells God that these things should happen to me. We don’t want that kind of tragedy that happened to Job to happen to us. When bad things happen, we still wonder whether we did anything wrong.

Shattering Fantasies

Once Helen came to me and told me Peter went golfing on Sunday and he did really bad. She said to him, “See, if you miss church, that’s what happens.” Don’t go play on Sunday, missing worship service. Go after. We still think that when bad things happen, automatically we think that we must have done something wrong, or somebody did. That’s why we feel guilty. When something bad or suffering happens to us, we feel guilty. Harold Christener talks about a family in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It’s a pretty good book if you haven’t read it, it’s a very old book, but it’s a pretty good book if you want to read it. A 19-year-old girl, in his synagogue, he is a rabbi, suddenly collapsed at her school. So a doctor came, but by the time the parents arrived, she had already died. She was only 19 years old. So the 19-year-old girl, she died, and after the funeral, the parents came to Harold and said, “Rabbi, at the last Yom Kippur, we didn’t fast.” They were saying that if they fasted at the last Yom Kippur, their daughter, would have survived, or nothing bad would have happened to her if they fasted at the last Yom Kippur. The Book of Job challenges the naive idea that ‘if I’m good, bad things will never happen to me’. That’s a fantasy. Morality and religion can be also another form of fantasy. People who go through suffering can create fantasy because it’s so hard to bear, so they create a fantasy. And this is what Nietzsche said: “The true meaning of life is too terrible for us to cope with, which is why we need our consoling illusions if we are to carry on.” The Bible shatters all these fantasies. It is people who make a fantasy from the Bible, but the Bible shatters all kinds of fantasies. All of Job’s fantasies are shattered.

Ask God to Be on Your Side

The worst of all Job’s suffering, what did I say? The worst of all suffering is what? To feel that God has abandoned you. This is Job’s confession. He said, “For the arrows of the Almighty are in me. My spirit drinks their poison. The terrors of God are arrayed against to me.” This is what Job said. He felt that not only was he abandoned by God, not only was God not on his side, but God attacked him. In another place, “If I sin, what do I do to you? You watcher of humanity. Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you?”

Isn’t it really cool, the Bible? They’re not just talking about good things. You don’t know, not even ten percent of what the Bible really says. This is a real confession of a human being. He feels that God is not on his side, that God had abandoned him. Not only abandoned him, He made him His target. That, as I said, is the worst feeling of suffering. All kinds of suffering are fine, but that feeling that God is not on your side, that is the worst feeling. You know, real courage – I said when it comes to suffering, people are not courageous – but real courage is when we suffer. When we lost everything, we still accept that God is on our side. That is real courage. When you lost everything, when you failed at everything, and even then you believe that God is on your side. That’s courage. That’s hard to accept. When suffering comes, that’s really hard to accept. In Romans 8, St. Paul said, “If God is for us, who is against us?” In other words, St. Paul experienced, in the most difficult time if suffering, he felt that God was for him. God was on his side. “Who will be against me?” That’s what he’s saying. If God is for me, who is against me? That’s courage for me. And then a little bit later he said, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Even death cannot separate us from the love of God.”

It was difficult for Job to accept this. You know, all his friends – sometimes friends are limited – all friends came to Job to console him and to help him. But what they actually did was they threw him into deeper despair by continuously saying that ‘You must have done something wrong. These kinds of things don’t happen to anyone if you didn’t do anything wrong’. They throw him into deeper despair by saying that. So when you meet friends, when you counsel somebody, be careful. Instead of helping them, you might throw them into a deeper despair. What are they implying? They’re implying that ‘God is not on your side’. Don’t misunderstand. God is not on your side. They want to continually assure Job that God was not on his side.

Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian said, “When we pray, we don’t ask God for anything. We simply ask God for God. We invite God into our lives.” I think that’s the best prayer. We simply ask God to be on our side. We simply ask God to be with us. Don’t ask for anything, just ask God to be with you and on your side. When we suffer, the only prayer we need is that God is on our side. That’s why Jesus said before he left the world, “I’ll be with you forever.” Jesus promised that he will be with us forever. In other words, ‘in all circumstances, I’ll be on your side. You are my child’. Would you ever give up your children because they are the worst criminal? Would you do that? No. Jesus says, “You are my child. I’ll never abandon you.” When you read the Prodigal Son, when the son left – I mean, you can’t do anything about it, when they leave, they leave. But you always wait. You always wait. You never forget them. You never abandon them.

God’s Compassion is Beyond Our Comprehension

You know, I found something wonderful about suffering. When suffering comes to us, it strikes us at the very core of our existence. Do you see this bruise? This kind of bruise is nothing, right? Pain on a part of your body is all right, but when the suffering hits the core of your existence, it hurts. When it takes away your dignity and everything that you believe, when it takes it away, it hurts. Pain hurts. That is really hurting. This is not hurting. That is real pain. When suffering hits us, it hits us in every aspect of our lives. Because it hits the core and every aspect of our lives. What I discovered, there’s one more thing that suffering hits, do you know what that is? Suffering hits the compassion of God. When it hits us at the very core, it also hits the compassion of God. And when the compassion of God is hit by our suffering, His grace is released. It’s like running, you know. I enjoy running these days. If you run, in the beginning, it’s really hard, but after a while it hits something and some good hormone is released and you feel good after that. In the same way, when suffering his us it, it hits us hard and at the very core but also hits God’s compassion. And when God’s compassion is hit, the grace of God is released.

You know the word compassion? What is compassion? Compassion is love, right? But that word is a combination of come and passion. Come is together, passion is suffering. The passion of Jesus Christ is the suffering of Jesus Christ. So, the word compassion is special love. It’s not just romantic love, it’s suffering love. So I translate that as suffering love. Compassion is suffering love. It’s a very, very special love. When suffering hits us, it hits God’s compassion, and when God’s compassion is hit, then the grace of God is released. We don’t always experience this God’s suffering love. When we go through suffering, you realize all of a sudden it’s there. I never knew this grace of God, but when you go through suffering, you find that it’s there. Suffering takes away everything from us, but it makes God’s grace and compassion available to us. When we have this compassion, when we experience this compassion, then you can have compassion for others. When you don’t experience this compassion, you cannot have compassion for others. But when you go through suffering and he experienced His grace and experience God’s compassion, then you can identify with others suffering. Then you become a compassionate person.

Without compassion, I think every human being will be hardened. So hardened, nothing will break them. So suffering does something very good. It makes us weak, but at the same time, it makes us compassionate. We can overcome our self-centeredness and understand others’ suffering. Understand others’ suffering. I think Job’s friends did not understand Job’s suffering. Understanding and comprehension are two different things. The word comprehend comes from ‘comprehendere’, a Latin verb. It means to grasp. Seize. Wrapping our minds around something so as to your understanding, like you grab it. So when you use the saying “Oh, now I grasped…” it’s comprehending it. Comprehending is to put things in your grasp and know what kind of understanding is the understanding of Job’s friends. With their limited knowledge, they tried to comprehend what happened to Job, but they were all wrong. So in the end, they were all punished by God. Not punished but rebuked by God.

Robert Browning’s poem, Andrea del Sarto, says “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s heaven for?” Our reach should exceed our grasp. Your life is not in your grasp, and suffering tells us that. How can we understand God’s creation by grasping it? I think Michelangelo is a genius, he does as a few other things with other pictures too, but with this picture – look at that hand, Adam and God – their fingers don’t meet. Their hands – it’s not grasping it, it’s kind of reaching out. Reaching out, but as you look at carefully who’s more urgent in reaching out? I think God, God is much more urgent in reaching out. So our life is not like grasping. We try to grasp and put everything in our control, but reaching out that is true understanding. Sometimes suffering is hard to grasp, hard to understand, but there is God’s compassion working beyond our comprehension.

Stand Tall Before the World

Job’s conclusion comes in chapter 38. In chapter 38, as you might expect, maybe you think that God will just give an answer. “Okay, this is my answer. One, two, three, four.” No, this is what God said:

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:

Job answered, ‘what are you talking about? I went through so much, what does that mean?’. I think there’s a wisdom there. God brings Job out and to see the whole world that He has created. You see it? Do you understand it? Have you gone into the foundation of the earth? Have you gone down to the ocean? Do you know all that? He shows that. You know, when we go through suffering, what do we do? We become withdrawn into our own small world. Why do these things happen to me? Why to me, not to her or to him? Me, me, me… we become so self-centred, we are kind of locked up in our small world and we cannot even move. At the end, suffering paralyzes us. God brings Job out of that small world, opens the world for him. See, now you stand tall before the world. This is what I created and you I will never be abandon. As I take care of this gigantic universe I will take care of you.

Here I am, God

Interesting word in Hebrew is called Hinenu. Hinenu is ‘here we are’. Hineni, with an I, is here I am, Hinenu is here we are. When God called Abraham, Abraham said: “Hineni, here I am.” When Samuel was called four times, and then when God calls Samuel goes and says, “Hineni, here I am.” When Isaiah experienced God’s presence in the temple, he said, “Woe to me, I’m a man of unclean lips and I saw the living God.” And then God sent charcoal and he cleansed lips and then after that God said, “Whom shall I send?” And then Isaiah said “Hineni, here I am. Send me.” That’s Hineni. I think that’s the answer to our suffering. When God’s grace hits us, now instead of running away into our own small world we come out, and God brings us out and lets us stand tall.

Hineni. Here I am. Nothing will destroy me. Nothing in this world can destroy me because God is on my side. Hineni, spirituality. Hinenu, spirituality. No matter how much suffering I may go through, I will stand tall. I will not be scared. I will not run away into fantasy. I will not run away into our own small world. I will stand tall. No matter how difficult our suffering may be, God will be with you. In the world, you may have tribulation, but be of good cheer. Have courage, and stand tall. Come out. Don’t lock yourself in that small world where you’re suffering and licking your wounds. Licking wounds in that small world will not help. Knowing that God is on your side, come out and stand tall. God will move you into the next stage of your life.