Job's Way Through Pain: Karma, Cliches & Questions

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Setting the Scene

Life is pain, highness! Anybody that says different is selling something.

~ WILLIAM GOLDMAN, The Princess Bride

A Way Through Pain

Pain, in its various shapes and shades, is an inevitable part of life, as Westley declares so memorably in The Princess Bride.¹ Equally certain is the fact that there are no easy answers to the problem of human suffering, and as you well know, anyone offering a quick-fix solution is probably up to no good.

The title of this book may give the impression that every painful experience gets left behind at some point, like a dark tunnel that disappears into the past once you manage to get through it. On the contrary, many wounds last a lifetime, and sometimes all we can do is try to come to terms with the hurt and then learn to wear the scars for the rest of our lives. In the opening lines of a memoir I read recently, the author describes the moment when her husband suffered a fatal coronary attack: ‘Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’² Such painful experiences (whether physical, emotional or psychological) paralyse us where we stand and steal our hope away, but they should not immobilize us forever. Even if we continue to be in pain for a very long time, it is important to keep moving through pain and to resist becoming stagnant.

To be clear from the outset, this book intends neither to eliminate your pain nor to enable you to ignore it. It has been written for those who, having experienced loss, trauma, grief or injustice, find themselves reaching for a hand in the hope of finding their feet again. My hope is that a better understanding of Job’s way through pain will prove helpful for sufferers seeking to find their way forward and Godward. But before we are introduced to Job, let us begin where every such journey begins: with real-life experiences of suffering.

I have asked some friends if they would be willing to share something of their own hurts in this opening chapter, since many of the questions that grip us so powerfully are born of such events. Each of them, as you will see, is seeking to find a way through pain in order that life might go on, even when there is little or no hope that things will ever again be as they once were. I am deeply grateful to Jamie, Roslyn and Wesley for their willingness to write so openly in this context.

Jamie Coyle (Brisbane, Australia)

As a 5-year-old boy, one of the best things about a weekend was that Dad was around for forty-eight hours straight. Dad represented a heap of fun: playing cricket in the backyard; massive wrestles when I jumped on him in the mornings; getting him to build me ramps for my BMX; crazy, made-up stories that sent my imagination buzzing; and following him around doing big boy stuff.

The best time for this was when our house was being built in Melbourne and we moved to Coldstream, a small town in the Yarra Valley known for its vineyards. My grandparents ran a Brussels sprout farm out there. Not only did this mean more crazy adventures over weekends, chasing cows, making cubbies in gigantic oak trees, having mud fights when it rained (and it rained a lot), but I also got to mow the lawns with my dad on the ride-on lawnmower every Saturday. Dad would put me between himself and the steering wheel and off we would go. Every now and then he would let me steer the mower, which made me feel like king of the world.

One particular Saturday, Dad and I went to mow the lawns, but instead of putting me on his lap like we did most weeks he put me on the front of the mower where there were some handles that I could hold. I was alright with this because it felt like I was riding the mower like a skateboard and I had the front seat so I could see what we were just about to cut down. But as we were mowing my dad turned right, and because I wasn’t holding on well enough, I fell to the left and my left arm went completely underneath the lawnmower.

There isn’t a lot that I remember after this point except pulling my arm out and seeing blood and mess. I remember that my mum ran out and wrapped my arm in a purple towel, her picking me up and her holding me tightly as she and I climbed into the back of the green Toyota Corolla, which Dad drove to the nearest hospital as fast as that 2.0 litre engine could handle. And as I slipped into shock I remember seeing the purple towel turn red.

For the next seven years, from the age of 5 to 12, the doctors tried to rebuild my left hand. So much damage had been done by the blades of that lawnmower. It had shattered a lot of bone and taken much muscle, which was hard to replace.

When I think back over this season of being in and out of hospitals, the thing I found hardest was that when the time came for my mum to leave the hospital to go be with my sisters, I would be left alone. When I was scared in the night and I called out, it wasn’t Mum that would come; it would be a nurse. When I cried, Mum wasn’t there to hold me; it was a stranger.

In the years after my accident, another thing I found difficult was so desperately wanting to ride my BMX like all my mates. I’d watch them go over jumps and push themselves to crazy limits (as far as a 7-year-old could push) and I wished I could join in. But I found it hard to go over jumps as my left hand couldn’t hold tight enough to the grip.

When I hit high school and the operations and hospital visits had all but come to an end, the realization that I was different hit me suddenly when other 12-year-old kids began to tease me about the weirdness of my hand. ‘Four Fingers’ was a popular nickname. Also, the movie Nightmare on Elm Street was in high circulation, so people would call me Freddy Krueger, because he had messed-up hands. Initially I was surprised and didn’t think much of it, but after a period of time of people not wanting to hang out with me and having no real friends throughout the whole of Year 7, I desperately wanted to be ‘normal’.

This motivated me to pursue whatever it would take to be liked. I did a heap of really dumb stuff in school in order to get people to like me or, at the very least, pay attention to me. When I hit Year 10, I took up surfing. I met some guys who would take me nearly every weekend, and over the course of two years I became decent at the sport. I also realized that people’s attitudes changed towards me. My mates respected me because I surfed well, and the girls began to pay attention too. So I threw myself into the sport more and embraced everything that came with the surf culture.

But what I was really doing was just trying to push the pain away, push away how I really felt about myself and not deal with it. I would ignore my hand. I would try never to look at it and would put it in my pocket in public. I would shy away from using it, but still be confronted by it in the mirror.

I can’t remember feeling angry at God for what happened. I don’t think I blamed him for the accident, nor did I hold my dad responsible for it. But the questions that it raised were questions of identity and usefulness. I would wonder, ‘How can someone like me, with a hand like this, be of use?’ I would think, ‘If I’m not normal, what am I?’ I would fear failure and hesitate in making decisions because I didn’t want to get that sinking feeling I got when I saw my hand. I guess I wondered how on earth God could make anything good come out of this. Because it didn’t feel good.

At the age of 20, I was at a Christian surfers’ event and I had an encounter with Jesus during worship like I had never experienced before. He didn’t just touch my heart but he sowed a deep belief that he wanted to restore me and show me that he values me, he delights over me, and he calls me his own.

This took a while to really set in, but I began making a choice to not hide my hand and pretend it didn’t exist. Instead of covering it up, I began talking about my hand and letting people see the real Jamie. I started by choosing not to leave it in my pocket at parties, at work and at church. When people asked, I would tell them my story and the story of Jesus reshaping me. And to my surprise, it impacted people. Things snowballed from there. I’m now in a band called Selahphonic and we tour many places in the world using music and film to communicate the great news of Jesus. My left hand is a big part of that message.

While I was picking up my 9-year-old son from school the other day, his friends gathered around to look at my hand and ask the harsh, blunt questions only kids know how to ask. As we walked home, he grabbed hold of my hand, looked up at me and said, ‘Dad, I wouldn’t want you any other way. I love that you are different.’

Roslyn Jones (Melbourne, Australia)

When we lost our little Solomon, born prematurely after a harrowing four days of desperate hope mixed with terrifying fear, I felt like I’d been washed up on the shore. I’d been cruising on what seemed like gentle currents, moving cautiously along in my pregnancy. Things were going well, he was following the growth charts, I had entered the ‘home straight’, and then suddenly out of the blue I was caught up by a freak wave and dumped on a sandbar, tumbled about, the life literally sucked out of me, barely knowing which way was up.

It felt as if a core part of me had been ripped away and I was left with a gaping void that resounded with aches and groans. Only those who have experienced grief that intense would know what I mean by those aches and groans. I was not prepared for the physical and emotional trauma of being separated from that little life growing within me, of holding his lifeless, peaceful body in my arms, seeing his tiny features perfectly formed and knowing it was the first and last time I would hold him close, of leaving the maternity hospital with empty arms, leaving my baby boy behind me, with