Reference no: EM133724923

Assignment:

How would the book Job respond to the husband suffering in the case study?

This answer is two parts: how the book would respond to the person pastorally AND how the book would respond to the person theologically, answering the sufferer's question, "Why am I suffering?"

(two paragraphs with explicit references connecting the case study to passages in the book.) Remember this is not your opinion. You are addressing the suffering as the Job author.

A Case Study on Suffering

You have developed a healthy friendship with your neighbors over the ten years you have lived next door to each other. They are a second generation, Latin American family with a belief in God, but their faith is not mature in robust theology. They seldom attend religious services and know little about the Bible, but they pray daily and seek to do right by God. Your children play with their children, now all in middle and high school. Both husband and wife work to make ends meet.

One day you see your neighbor escort an elderly woman into the home in a wheelchair. You walk over to help hold open the door, and she tells you that her mother's dementia is worsening. She fell and broke her hip in her apartment, and she does not have long-term care insurance. Therefore, the elderly, frail woman is moving into their home. Your neighbor begins to cry because she is overwhelmed thinking about how to care for her mother while also fulfilling her other responsibilities at work and home.

A few days later you meet the husband at the mailbox and ask how it's going with the mother-in-law moving into the home. He says that's the least of his worries. Their eldest son was admitted to the hospital for alcohol poisoning the day before and is spending sixty days in a rehabilitation facility. The financial strain to pay for that, plus a lingering hospital bill from his wife's ovarian cancer treatment three years prior is crippling them, and he doesn't know how he is going to be able to keep the house. The creditors are beginning to call. Your neighbor is visibly under stress.

That weekend you catch a couple of teenagers trying to steal the copper wire from your outdoor air-conditioning unit. Your home security system motion detector went off, scaring away the thieves, but they did not run far. They merely moved next door where they stole the copper from your neighbor's unit. Their entire air-conditioning unit now needs to be replaced because of the damage done in the theft. The total is over $8,000 and your neighbors simply do not have the funds to pay for it. It is July and the elderly mother with dementia is now regularly trying to walk out of the house to escape the heat. You spend a couple of hours Monday morning helping your neighbors find her. She was finally found sitting in the woods behind a home at the end of the subdivision in her nightgown. You and your neighbors were late for work by the time you got the elderly woman home and a sturdy lock installed on the door.

You bring a meal to the neighbor's home on Wednesday, and they invite you to sit and eat with them. They confess, in tears, that they are at their wit's end. They don't see any way out of their stress and sorrow. Your neighbor shares that she is experiencing symptoms that point to the return of her cancer, but she is scared to go to the doctor because she is certain the family is being punished by God for something they've done. One horrible event is occurring after another, and she doesn't know why.

They are despairing under the weight of an alcoholic teenager, the bank calling to squeeze from them a mortgage payment they don't have, the elderly mother's needs, no air-conditioning, the likely return of cancer; and now the husband's boss is threatening to fire him because he is missing so much work, and the younger child-a fourteen year old girl- has started to self-harm as a means of dealing with the stress. "Why is this happening to us?" asks the husband.

"Yes, why would God give us all of this suffering? We are good people!" cries the wife. "You are a faithful Christian, and you know the Bible well. Tell us what the Bible says about why people suffer like this. We need answers. We are so tired and angry."