I am always reminded of the Serenity Prayer when reading through the book of Job. Job spends the whole book trying to reconcile the three truths he is caught between: that he has done nothing wrong, that God is just, and that despite that, he is still suffering. He is bounded most closely to that first truth, his righteousness, which is what eventually gets him in hot water first with Elihu and then God. He isn’t wrong to claim that he is blameless--in fact, God even confirms that he is--but the way he ends up coming at the situation by the time his three “buddies” are done with him is no longer from a place of humility. He’s become quite the misanthrope, and on top of that, he’s not interested in defending God. He’s been dealt a bad hand, but he’ll be damned if anyone believes it’s becuase he has beef with the dealer. And he’s very clearly frustrated with the situation he has ended up in. He’s mad becuase he can’t do anything about it. He has done everything as best as he could, left it all out on the court, gave 110%, and still ends up lying in a ditch covered in boils. He knows better than to curse God, but he sure seems to be asking, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
And from there we get the beautiful series of rhetorical questions from God that defines the book of Job. Through each, God presents Job with stunning vignettes of the universe at varying scales: asking if Job can hold the Pleiades together, or if he knows how long a deer will calf its young, or if he’s ever walked the bottom of the ocean. Job’s initial response is something along the lines of, “What do you want me to say? I’m just a man.” Which is exactly God’s point. All of these things are out of Job’s hands. And not once has he worried about the stars in the sky or the deer in the field or the bottom of the ocean! This tragedy and suffering he’s experiencing, too, is not his responsibility. But because it is proximal to him, he’s decided to try and bear this onus that he can’t carry. And complain the whole time!
The idea behind the Serenity Prayer--to accept what I can’t change, and change what I can’t accept--is very central to the philosophy of the book of Job. Job ends up caught between those two actions: what is he to do if he can’t change what happened, but he also can’t accept the current circumstance in which he finds himself? There must be a space between those two options: for the things that can be changed, just not by us. But we can hope for and dream of a day when those things have been changed by something else, something more powerful and benevolent than we are. We can learn to accept a situation not for the way it is now, but for the future redemption; the kind that we cannot see or bring about ourselves.