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A number of years ago, I had a moment in my ministry where everything just kept piling up. I was already teaching a number of classes when a Sunday School teacher bailed at the last minute with no one else but me to take that place. I had also recently gotten an injury from running which was still healing up. Because of my lack of time, I stopped doing those things that connected me to God, like my monthly spiritual retreat. The result was that while I kept doing the work God had given me to do, I was struggling to feel God’s presence in that work still.
Then one day I got asked by my Diocese to help with a Spiritual Workshop over the weekend. My role wasn’t big and it seemed like something I would enjoy doing. Plus with recent confirmation prep and Baptisms behind me, why not take something else on.
It turned out one of the priests leading this workshop had to leave early, and I was asked if I would mind helping celebrate the Eucharist for the group. Saying “yes” was the best thing I could have possibly done. For the first time in a long time, I felt God’s presence there with me in service. For the first time in a while, I knew God was there.
When we are in the worst of it, we don’t always feel God’s presence. That doesn’t mean that God isn’t with us. Most of the time, it just means we aren’t taking the time to recognize that presence.
Job is a great place for us to start in trying to recognize God’s presence through our difficulties. After all, the Book of Job is possibly the most famous story of constant hardships arriving one after another. At the start of the book, we learn that Job is a good and pious man. The struggle throughout the book, particularly with his friends, is discerning what Job did to lead to so many punishments, one after another. Job just wants a face-to-face with God.
In our reading this morning, Job gets that prayer answered. We only see the beginning of God’s soliloquy to Job, but in the later parts, God uses the same words that Job did with his friends earlier. God is trying to show Job that even in his suffering, God has been listening the whole time. Job’s response at the very end of the book is best translated as saying he is “comforted” by this revelation and by understanding that God has, in fact, been present throughout everything.
We see the same in the Gospel According to Mark. Jesus’ Disciples are out in their boats when a storm whirls up all around them. They fear for their lives, but the whole time, Jesus is there with them, albeit asleep. Even in the midst of their troubles, God is there.
That is why God chastises Job and Jesus chastises His Disciples in the end. As Jesus asks, “have you no faith?” Even as they suffered, did they not know that God was with them?
The truth is that we all face difficult moments in our lives. In this broken world filled with us broken people, we cannot expect anything else. We must come to terms with whether we will remember that God is there, even when it might seem like He’s asleep at the stern. When we encounter hardships, will we take the time to let God in and be present with our Lord? Will we do so now?
From my own experience, I can say that there are difficult times when it doesn’t seem like God is with us, but He is there all the same. In the midst of those times, it seems like our troubles will never end, just as Job and the Disciples must have felt, but those dark times do conclude eventually. For myself, I often wonder why I let everything get to me and why I didn’t trust in God a little more. I hope that you will take the time to deepen your relationship with God so that when you face hard times, you will feel God present there and if you find Him sleeping at the stern that you will not worry but instead have Faith.