JOB, RESTORED

Okay, this was one of the very powerful signs from my journey through Spring the other day. It takes some background information to understand why this image was so powerful to me.

So, this is the apartment that my husband and I lived in between his first and second overseas deployments, somewhere back like five to seven years ago. It was us and the first kid and the first dog, and it was a hot mess back then. This is where I lived when I worked with Ms J that I mentioned in the previous entry. It was before I moved to the house I live in now, but was two years in this house before I left the job J and I shared.
When I moved to the new house, I also got a puppy, my Scout dog, and he was a terror. One day, he decided to "get himself some religion". I've told this story elsewhere in this blog, but here is a shorter version: I was sleeping in on a Sunday, and realized slowly that the door to my room was ajar, which meant the puppy was roaming loose. I walked into the living room, and...what bedlam. Pillow stuffing and torn littering all over the carpet, and worse of all, my brand new fancy leather Bible, chewed and laying agape across my end table, with puppy teeth marks all over the edges.
The Bible was laying open to Job 42: Job Is Restored
That was the only page that was torn, and I taped it back together. The damage to the spine may be permanent, though, as every time I open my Bible now, it naturally falls open to that page. For a long time, I wondered if God wasn't trying to tell me something. I pondered Job a lot in the past five years.
There are a lot of different ways of understanding Job, but this is the way I understand it, short and sweet: One day Satan and God made a little wager about Job, and God let Satan test him. All kinds of terrible things happened to Job, woe and misfortune. Lots of dialogue happens between various characters on why this happened to him, posing the question, "is misfortune always a divine punishment for something?" Job remained faithful to his God, and in the end, was rewarded.
Job was restored. The Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before.

I drove past my old apartment complex on the way to the dentist. I expected the old apartment to look like it had all the times I have driven past it in the past few years - vacant, empty, run down, the whole complex falling apart at the seams.
This time, though, I was in shock as I rounded the turn. All the units had been freshly painted, and there was a new complex name on the sign.
Bought out.
Renovated.
Restored.

That's how I feel.