"Lord, Help My Unbelief"

"Lord, Help My Unbelief"
by Karen Kornelsen, Children's Ministries Team

Job’s wife gets a bad rap.  Whenever I hear her mentioned, it’s about her one line – her one moment of infamy where she tells Job to curse God and die.  One moment of a long life that was marked with bitterness and pain, but that was also graced with abundance and opportunities to find joy.  We don’t know her journey, except through what happens to Job.  We don’t know anything about her relationship with the Lord before or after that one moment in time.  For some reason, in God’s sovereignty, she was not given a voice, except once.

I like Job’s wife.  She’s relatable. Similar to her, I have been shaken to the core, and angry at what God has allowed.  I don’t think I ever used the words “curse God and die”, but I sure could relate to the sentiment behind them.  I get why she would say it.  She was deeply grieving the loss of everything she held dear.  She was angry, and that anger came out.  I can empathize with her hurting heart.
 
There were years in my story marked with anger towards what God had allowed in my life.  If God really cared, why would he allow our family to walk such a hard road?  Why would He let my kids grow up without a healthy father?  For a long stretch of that time, I had zero desire to be in the Word.  What difference would it make for me to read words written by a seemingly distant God?  And yet, somehow, there was one passage that I could stomach.  In Habakkuk 3, there is a written example of how I felt my life was going.  He basically says: though everything around me is falling apart, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I related to the abysmal part, but there was nothing in me that wanted to rejoice in the Lord.  Taking joy in the God of my salvation did not come naturally.  Or at all.  Each time I read those verses, I finished it with a half-hearted, “Lord, help my unbelief”.  I just wasn’t at a place of rejoicing, but maybe, just maybe God would hear my guarded plea.

Job’s wife’s story doesn’t end with her one liner, and my story isn’t defined by one angry moment in time.  Did she ever repent of her attitude?  Was she able to see God’s goodness in her circumstances?  Was she ever able to see beyond what was happening around her, to realize that it’s His presence in those deeply distressing times that brings fullness of joy?  I don’t know what that looked like for her, but I do know what that looked like for me.  The Lord has brought me from the long, dark night of the soul, to a place of being able to rejoice in the God of my salvation.  What I’m walking through hasn’t changed, but He has changed me.  He has stayed with me as I have cried out to Him in pain, distress and anger, and he has loved me through it.  He wants to be with me, and He wants me to be with Him.  He is the source of my strength and He gives me the ability to keep going, to stand firm, and to walk through what feels overwhelming.

Sorrow has come.  And it has lasted for a long, dark night.  Yet, I choose to rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.  Lord, help my unbelief.