Book of Job

At some time we'll all feel a kinship with Job, We'll be beset by adversity, and everything we touch will be going wrong.

And it feels like we're powerless to stop the spiral.

Job must have felt that way. His family killed, his livelihood destroyed, reduced to sitting on a trash heap, picking at sores with a stick.

"I was an honest, upright man. How did it come to this?"

His wife told him to curse God and die.

But Job had four resources left - the three friends who came to visit him, and his faith. They saw him through.

Not that it wasn't hard - it's certainly a stretch to see a serene Job, whiling away the time. He probably had some hard days.

But, to steal a line from the marvelous Bruce Willis movie, Tears of the Sun, "A thousand difficulties don't make a doubt."

Just know this - God will not let the devil kill you.

You have to die, of course - we all do - but this is a spiritual death from which God has promised salvation. You may be battered and bruised, and die bloody - but you'll wake from this fitful sleep we call life in God's arms, and it will all seem to have been a bad dream.