Some of us who have been suffering the frustrations of prolonged joblessness could do well to supplement our job search with a Jōb Search. Myself included.

A job search, of course, is the pursuit of meaningful work–and the temporal resources for holding body and soul together. But a Jōb Search is the quest for meaning in life–eternal truths for both this life and the next. Questions like “What’s the point of this suffering?” and “Why me, Lord?”

These are the sorts of questions that racked the soul of Jōb in one of the most amazing books of the entire Old Testament. Many scholars believe it to be the oldest book of the Bible, including Genesis. And it is also one of the most profoundly philosophical books, whose depths could take a lifetime to plumb.

“It is not suffering as such that troubles us,” writes Eugene Peterson in his brilliant introduction to Jōb in his Bible paraphrase, The Message. “It is undeserved suffering.” He adds:

Almost all of us in our years of growing up have the experience of disobeying our parents and getting punished for it. When that discipline was connected with wrongdoing, it had a certain sense of justice to it: When we do wrong, we get punished.

One of the surprises as we get older, however, is that we come to see that there is no real correlation between the amount of wrong we commit and the amount of pain we experience. An even larger surprise is that very often there is something quite the opposite: We do right and get knocked down. We do the best we are capable of doing, and just as we are reaching out to receive our reward we are hit from the blind side and sent reeling. [Emphasis added.]

Sound familiar? It sure does to me. I subtitled my PowerPoint presentation on Back to Work! “How do we work when life doesn’t?” I’ll say it again: The search for meaningful work is really a subset of the search for meaningful life. And, yes, sometimes God allows struggles in the former as a way of getting us to deal with the latter.

Not that Jōb offers any pat formula for avoiding–or even explaining–suffering in life. No, writes Peterson: “Suffering is a mystery, and Jōb comes to respsect the mystery. In the course of facing, questioning, and respecting suffering, Jōb finds himself in an even larger mystery–the mystery of God.”

Will you go on that search with us?