Homily, 9-30-24; Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time:
“Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD!”
Job received many blessings from the Lord, and so have I. That’s why when people ask me how I am doing, I usually respond with the line I stole from Dave Ramsey: “Better than I deserve.” I have visited many third world countries—the Congo, Haiti, Tanzania, Mexico, Bolivia—where people struggle with the necessities of life: clean water, food, housing; and they often don’t have things that we take for granted like electricity and the internet. When I look around and stop and think, I realize how many blessing I have received due simply to being born in this country to good parents who loved me. I had nothing to do with my starting circumstances and the opportunities they provided. If we think about it, probably all of us can say that we are better than we deserve.
And yet, when things go wrong in our life, how easy it is for us to complain and grumble. How hard it is for us to see and accept the difficulties that we encounter as the will of God. And in this way, our blessings can become obstacles for us when they are taken away. Our focus on maintaining our material blessings interferes with our true goal of being blessed with a heavenly reward. We not only have to accept the bad with the good, but we can also try to actually be thankful to God for a hardship we have received because it might result in a greater good, either for ourselves or for someone else. It’s a challenge. It’s not natural for us. We have a hard enough time thanking God for our blessings let alone thanking Him when they are taken away.
When I reflect on this passage from Job, I often try to put myself in his position. How would I respond if the stock market crashed and my retirement savings were wiped out, if my house burned down, if a communist country invaded our country and I had to live oppressed in a dictatorship? Do I have faith like Job’s that would allow me to accept these misfortunes; misfortunes that people around the world endure each day; poverty, homelessness, oppression?
We need to work to develop a balance as St. Paul did to level out the bumps along our journey. He wrote in his letter to the Philippians: “I know indeed how to live in humble circumstances; I know also how to live with abundance. In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need” (Phil. 4:12).
In difficult times, let us not lose faith. Let us pray as Job did: “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD!”