Job 31: 15 “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”
I like to ask questions. The problem is that, more times than I’d like to admit, I ask questions because I don’t want to accept an answer rather than out of a desire to know the answer.
The book of Job is filled with questions and, in fact, culminates with the questions God asks Job.
Job knows the answer to these two questions he asks about his accusers.
Yes.
Most definitely.
God made Job, and God made his accusers.
That is, Job and his accusers are alike at the deepest level.
Job brings up the womb quite pointedly. For the past several chapters, he’s heard his “friends” declare what’s been wrong with Job’s life post-birth. Their categories have been simple: righteous and unrighteous. Since God only punishes the unrighteous, Job’s current predicament indicates his sinfulness.
But these categories are examples of what Alan Jacobs calls “lumping” in his book How to Think. Lumping is an important cognitive exercise where we group data into existing categories, but precisely because those categories are old standbys, they tend to get trotted out as a way to avoid reflection.
Job’s category—a single one that includes both him and his accusers and everyone else—is made up of people God created. This is what Alan Jacobs calls splitting, an example where Job has categorized data by a new set of categories. In this sense, he’s “splitting” even though he trots out one less category than his friends.
This push and pull between familiar and unfamiliar categories is old hat for me, and I’ve been feeling it a lot lately: namely, the need to evaluate more, to lean into difficult questions and underlying tensions with my faith and my relationships even while trying to practice a kind of patience that allows these tensions to exist without me trying to fix them right away.
Keeping that balance on my own is impossible. It requires the Spirit.
What’s particularly difficult about this balance is that this tension is never lived out in a vacuum. It’s not an experiment in some laboratory. I can see my own inner turmoil play itself out in my family life or inside my classroom.
Am I separate or part of the community? Am I trying to reach an agreement and find commonality or is it my job to divide and separate? Am I to apply existing categories to new data or do my best to find new categories to apply to old data?
As a disciple and educator, these are questions I will be asking the rest of my life.
Unlike Job’s questions, I don’t know the answer.
Like Job, I know the one who does.
