Summary: In this story, Job is not, shall we say, winning. In chapter one he loses all his material wealth. His servants are killed by invaders; his livestock are killed by fire, and a tornado knocks down the home of his eldest son, killing all of his children. That's one terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. But bad days like that never seem to come by themselves, and Job's not-winning streak is not over. Here in chapter two, he wakes up with every inch of his body covered in painful sores, and we find him - understandably - just sitting in ashes, scraping his skin with a piece of pottery. His wife swings by to tell him to quit with all the integrity already and just curse God and die; then his friends show up to tell him it must be his own fault. You would think this tale of catastrophe and suffering would resonate with people more. If we live long enough, many of us experience some version of this where, through no fault of our own, we suffer enormous, painful loss - and, like Job, it comes in waves. The economy tanks and we lose our job, our home, our business, or maybe all three. Our loved ones are taken by disaster, violence, or disease. And those stresses take their toll on both our emotional and physical health until we end up depressed and sitting in the ashes, wondering if God either sees or cares. But despite all those points of connection, a lot of people avoid the book of Job. Some forget that this is a story that begins with the Hebrew equivalent of "once upon a time." Those readers take the literary device at the beginning literally and think God actually is awful enough to bargain with Satan and do all those horrible things to Job for the sake of some grand lesson. "Not my God" they think and move on.
