I Can't Hear You, Lord

Last night I came to the realization that we aren't really being told to give thanks for Teh Suck. "Wow, thanks God that my life totally sucks , yeah, I really appreciate that..." Nope. Not it at all. So...what ARE we being told to give thanks for? Same thing I did last night. "God...even though my situation may suck Major Yucky Rocks, thank you that YOU are working to make it for the best. Thank you that somehow, this will be all For The Good. I might not ever see it, but I know it's there, so thanks for that, at least." Doesn't make it any less sucky. But it does give the Suck a purpose.

Huh. I just read this bit from the TV Tropes website, about the book of Job: The lesson of the book was supposed to be to not treat God and religion as something formulaic, like Job and his friends had been doing - that they need to understand, not just blindly follow...The end of the book reveals that the entire thing was a big test to make Job see that questioning God and his actions IS okay, because he was only human. It didn't help that his wife and friends either wanted him to think it was his fault somehow, or straight out be blasphemous. God yelled at him for being stubborn at the end of it, but for being so faithful, gave him TWICE what he started with. Actually, surprisingly, the one that got off the easiest was the youngest of them, because, ironically, he was the wisest out of the four. Huh. That makes way, way WAY more sense than "God was testing Job" for...um...what reason again? Seriously, the "standard" interpretation that God allowed Job to b...

This one..I'm not even sure I want to post about it, except that I don't want to forget about it later, so I need someplace "permanent" for it. So. On the way home on Thursday, I started thinking about Giving Up Stuff For Lent, and how we do that to give up something important to us and so forth and so on. And then I realized that there's a lot of stuff I'd be way better off giving up that I was hanging on to, so I talked to God about it. I suppose you could say I prayed about it, but there was nothing remotely like the normal prayers we think of. It really was a chat. One sided, obviously, I mean really, see the URL, but still a chat. And what I "got" out of our chat is that I've been hanging onto misery . Yes, I'm not happy about my job, the commute sucks, being away from home and so on still blows. I'm still not "yay, I get to go live away from my family for another week!" But...I also don't need to be dwelling on ...