This is part of my series Trusting God When It’s Not Okay, written while I’m still in the middle of a hard season. You can start at the beginning with Through, Not Around.
Earlier this fall I felt compelled to read the last chapter of Job. I’m not totally sure why, other than that it felt like God was nudging me there. But I found a lot of encouragement and comfort in it, and I wanted to share why.
If you know the story of Job, you know it’s pretty brutal. He loses his livestock, his servants, his wealth, and then all ten of his children, all in a short span of time. Then he loses his health. His friends come and sit with him, which is good, but then they spend most of the book telling him this must be his fault. Job spends chapter after chapter in grief and confusion, asking God why, and for a long time it doesn’t seem like God answers.
Then you get to chapter 42, and it says “the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.” God restores his fortunes, gives him twice as much as he had before, and he has ten more children. He lives another hundred and forty years and sees his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I want to be careful here, because I don’t think the end of the book is saying that everything Job lost didn’t matter, or that the new children replaced the ones who died. They didn’t. Those losses were real and they were horrible, and I don’t think the blessing on the other side minimizes them at all. Job still went through what he went through.
But what I felt like God was saying to me when I read it is that there is an other side. Job didn’t know that while he was in the middle of it. He was sitting in the ashes without any idea how it would end. We get to read the last chapter, but he had to live through all the chapters before it first.
I live in Jacksonville, and I think about it like this. If you stood on the beach and looked out at the Atlantic, and you had no idea there was anything besides where you live, you’d have no reason to think there was land out there. All you’d see is water. But if you stand on the bank of the St. Johns River, you can see there’s a bank on the other side. Knowing that it’s there is what makes you willing to get in the water. When it seems like there’s nowhere to go, it’s really easy to just sit down and give up. But when you know there’s somewhere, even if you don’t know what it is, it gives you hope and makes it possible to keep going.
That reminds me of Abraham. When God called him out of Ur, he told him to go “to the land that I will show.” God didn’t tell him where it was, what he’d do when he got there, or how to get there. Hebrews says he went out not knowing where he was going. It was kind of like God being his GPS, just telling him to turn right at the next light, and Abraham did it. He didn’t need to know where he was going. He just needed to know there was somewhere, and that God would lead him there.
That’s what the end of Job did for me. It reminded me that there is an other side, and I think there’s a way to have hope when you know that. Not a hope that pretends things aren’t bad, and not a hope that this will turn out exactly the way I want. Just a hope that this isn’t the end of the story. That’s been really comforting to me this year, because some days it feels like I’m in one of the middle chapters where nothing makes sense and it’s hard to see how any of it gets better.
I don’t know what my other side looks like yet, or how I’m going to get there. I’m not expecting God to double everything for me the way he did for Job. But I believe there is an other side, and knowing that makes me willing to follow him toward it, one turn at a time.
Maybe you’re in a middle chapter of your own right now. If you are, you’re not the only one. The story keeps going. The hard part is real, and the other side is too.
Written by Kristen Davis, Ph.D., founder of DoubtLess Faith. I also walk alongside people one-on-one as a faith coach. If you’re in a hard season and would like someone to walk through it with you, you can book a session here.
