The Mirror of the Word and other works by C.E. White can be purchased on her website, cewhitebooks.com or on Amazon.

“He said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’”

—Job 1:21

In the middle of his tragedy, Job was blessing, praising, and trusting the Lord.

He did not blame or rail against the Lord. He grieved, but within that grief, he still held on to his confidence in the goodness of God. He asked why, but he did not curse God, though his wife told him he should. He wished to die, yet he did not renounce his faith.

He kept his eternal mindset, recognizing that nothing he had in this world would be taken with him into eternity, and if God saw fit to take it before his death, in the end, there was no difference.

There will be times in our lives when we don’t understand what God is doing and we feel abandoned by him. We may even—like Job—sometimes we wish we’d never been born (Job 3:1–16). It’s okay to vocalize that and take it to the Lord in prayer and lamentation. It’s okay to cry out in anguish.

Ultimately, what carries us through is knowing the end—that all we can see is passing away and our earthly sorrows will all be forgotten.

The things that will be carried into eternity cannot be taken away, and Job knew that.

May we all hold our lives on this earth so loosely that even when everything we have and everyone we love is gone, we can still bless the name of the Lord.

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