Awesome

I was having a bad day the other afternoon. It happens. Wasn’t the first, won’t be the last. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. I had been writing a great deal but my mind kept circling around to my circumstances which led me to feel lonely and somewhat defeated.



It’s hard to imagine being lonely in a building with 96 guys living on top of one another, but it happens. Just the other day, I read this remarkably profound piece about loneliness and rejection hurting more than any physical pain. We’re wired to be loved and accepted. When we’re not, when we ache for that one person to say “I love you” and they don’t, the pain slices through us.


I did what I do whenever I feel really lousy. I went outside, alone, to run and vent to myself and my God. I started jogging around the nearly deserted rec yard and that didn’t even seem to help. All I saw was the fence and the tower. I started talking to myself, complaining mostly, about where I was. I didn’t mean physically. I knew where I was and why. Instead, I felt all the rejection from family, abandonment by friends. I was lonely, tired and, well, feeling sorry for myself. “I don’t deserve all this”, I thought.


Around the track I kept muttering under my breath “why”, and “is this ever going to end?” As I came around to my starting point and began a new lap, suddenly “WHAP!” A huge bug flew directly into my sunglasses. It caused me to stop for a moment. I realized in that brief, goofy, post splat moment everything was all right.


It’s very strange how and when we get signs that remind us things are never really as bad as they seem. Sunday was a beautiful, late summer day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The trees were still green and full. The temperature, mid 80’s with low humidity. We have two ducks who have made themselves at home here. They were happily waddling around the yard.


I recently read an essay about the Old Testament Book of Job. Just about everyone knows Job’s story. God gives Satan permission to completely destroy Job’s life, to prove Job would never curse his Lord. His kids are killed, his wealth is taken away, his health deteriorates, his wife abandons him after first telling him to “curse God and die”. Even his friends attempt to rationalize all the bad in his life by telling him he obviously hadn’t lived a good life.


Now, I don’t profess to be a good, moral man like Job. But, I feel for him and get what he went through. And, like Job, I’ve had my fair share of arguments with God. I know what I did was wrong, criminal, but still I want to yell out “doesn’t the punishment exceed the crime”? I’m talking about my family, my ex-wife and kids.


As I laughed about that poor, blind bug who slammed head long into me, I marveled at the beauty and majesty of nature. It really is a beautiful planet and everything is so interconnected. It is more than mere happenstance that nature is as it is.


Job became so absorbed in his personal suffering that he missed, for awhile anyway, how much trust and love God had for him. God knew Job wouldn’t break. As he argued with God he soon realized a God who could create the whole world could tackle his problems. In one of my favorite verses (42:2) in awe he states to God “I know that You can do everything”.


I still don’t know why God allows pain and suffering in our lives that is beyond our ability to comprehend. I don’t know why good people succumb to temptation, why evil seems to succeed so much, why people you love reject you, why prisons fail so miserably.


I do know this, if He could make a day as beautiful as Sunday, He can be trusted with my suffering. Thanks to that bug, I had an awesome run.