You may be thinking, Job’s suffering was worse than mine, but his story had a happy ending. God gave him back everything he lost. That’s never going to happen for me. You may be right. Often, God orchestrates deep losses that are never restored in our lifetime. That’s where we need to look beyond Job’s story — and frankly, our own stories — to Jesus.

Before we turned 32, my wife and I said goodbye to our golden years — and to the second half we had hoped for. The one where our kids, deeply committed to the Lord, finally grow up and leave college, giving us long-awaited margin and freedom to serve the church more deeply, relocate, and travel together.

Our precious son Matthew has autism. His diagnosis changed our family’s future forever. Matthew will not go off to school, get married, or do all the other things we typically hope for our children. At a time where we were hoping to launch him into the world for Christ, we need to have him declared legally “incompetent” so we can make decisions on his behalf. But the hardest losses are unseen, and we still grieve not truly knowing, and being known by, the person we thought he’d be.

While we know this is God’s best for us, it’s still very hard and can bring us to tears on any given day, often without warning. The next season of our lives is going to be messy, unpredictable, and far more restrictive than we imagined on the day he was born.

We know we are not alone. Many of you are facing your own challenges as you look ahead. A failed, or cold, marriage. Physical limitations that make life painful and slow. Children who aren’t walking with Jesus. Aging parents who now need you to parent them. Work that pays the bills but offers little else. Yet even if the journey ahead looks bleak, God invites us to find deep joy in him, often through stories like Job’s.

What to Do When All Goes Wrong

We can’t be sure how old Job was when calamity found him, but he was old enough to have ten children, and be known as “the greatest of all the people of the east” (Job 1:3).

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