Assign me a Bible character

A brutally honest submission from a subscriber about grief, purpose, family and starting again.

Assign me a Bible character

This week’s submission from Andrew H began with a compliment, moved briefly into a discussion about the Substack algorithm and then delivered enough human experience to fill several Old Testament books.

First of all, you should have a lot more subscribers and followers.

Second, your posts and articles get about as much traffic as mine. I guess we’re not in the algorithm yet.

So, thirdly, here’s my situation in two sentences: I was forced to resign a 25-year teaching career this past January, my wife and I adopted a six-year-old who was literally dropped off at our house about three years ago after having five biological children of our own, and my identical twin brother was murdered almost five years ago. In the meantime, I have no steady source of income, earned a master’s degree in art history where I learned I love to research art and the Bible, and my wife and kids still love me and I love them.

Assign me a Bible character.

First of all, thank you. I agree that I should have more subscribers and followers, although I also believe I should have better knees, a larger house and considerably more money than I currently possess. Unfortunately, the universe has yet to consult me on any of these matters.

As for the algorithm, I have concluded that it is either completely random or has developed a personal dislike of us both. There are people online filming themselves pointing at words while music plays in the background who appear to have mastered it, so perhaps the problem is that we are trying to communicate actual thoughts.

Your third point, however, markedly changed the atmosphere.

There is so much contained in those two sentences that assigning you a single Bible character feels slightly ridiculous. You have lost a career that occupied a quarter of a century, endured the murder of your identical twin, opened your home to a child who had been abandoned, raised a family of seven children, completed a master’s degree, discovered a love for the relationship between art and Scripture and now find yourself trying to work out how to support the people you love without any reliable income.

You then finished by saying that your wife and children still love you, and that you still love them. That last sentence stayed with me longer than anything else you wrote.

After considering several candidates, I have assigned your case to Job.

I am aware that this is the most obvious possible answer. Someone mentions grief, upheaval and uncertainty and the Christian immediately reaches for Job, rather like a doctor taking one look and saying ‘viral infection - NEXT!’ before you’ve had chance to tell him your symptoms. There is always a danger that Job becomes biblical shorthand for “a bloke who had a terrible time,” which does neither him nor the suffering person - in this case you - much justice.

Your resemblance to Job runs deeper than the fact that you have both suffered however. It lies in the way a settled life can suddenly become unfamiliar, leaving you surrounded by the remains of things you once assumed were permanent.

For twenty-five years, you were a teacher. That was presumably more than a source of income; after that length of time, it would have formed part of your identity, your daily rhythm and your understanding of your place in the world. People asked what you did and you had an answer. Your weeks had shape, your experience had value and your future probably extended naturally from what had gone before.

Then, in January, you were forced to resign.

I do not know the circumstances surrounding that resignation and I will not pretend that a Bible verse can make it feel fair. Losing a career after twenty-five years is a form of grief in its own right, because the loss extends beyond the job itself. It takes away routine, purpose, status, financial security and the version of the future you expected to inhabit.

Job would recognise that sudden collapse of certainty. At the beginning of his story, his life appears secure and established; shortly afterwards, almost every structure upon which that security rested has been removed. What makes the book so powerful is that Job does not react like the religious hero we might prefer him to be. He grieves noisily, speaks bitterly, questions God and repeatedly asks why his life has been allowed to become what it has become. This unfiltered grit and realness is what I am personally coming to appreciate about the Bible recently.

People often describe Job as patient, although anyone who reads the whole book may wonder whether they have confused him with somebody else. Job is faithful, for sure, but his faithfulness includes anger, bewilderment and the refusal to offer God a tidy version of his pain. He does not pretend that suffering makes sense merely because he believes in God.

That may be the first reason I would place you beside him.

You have lived through the murder of your identical twin brother, a loss whose depth I would not insult by trying to explain. A twin is not simply a sibling who happens to share a birthday. The bond begins before memory, language or conscious choice, which means the absence must carry a particular strangeness. You have lost someone who was connected to your own identity in a way most of us will never fully understand.

The Book of Job gives people permission to speak honestly from that kind of grief. It does not rush the bereaved person towards acceptance, gratitude or a lesson. Job’s friends (who I am irrationally irritated by every time I read that book) attempt to make his suffering manageable by explaining it; their explanations become increasingly confident as they become increasingly wrong. They assume pain must have a clear cause, that God must be operating according to a formula (at least one that the perspective of mere mortals would comprehend) and that Job would understand his situation if only he became more reasonable.

God’s response makes clear that their certainty was misplaced.

That feels worth remembering because Christians can become uncomfortable when pain refuses to resolve itself neatly. We sometimes reach for explanations because another person’s suffering frightens us and an explanation gives us the illusion of control. Job reminds us that sitting beside somebody in the ashes may be more faithful than attempting to tell them why the fire happened in the first place.

Your story also contains something Job would understand from another angle: the strange coexistence of devastation and love.

Around two years after your brother was murdered, a six-year-old child was literally dropped off at your house. I do not know the full story behind that sentence, although the few words you used suggest an entire world of rejection, confusion and vulnerability. You and your wife already had five biological children, yet somehow your family expanded again, apparently without the sort of preparation people usually expect before becoming parents.

There is something deeply biblical in that. Scripture is filled with people whose families are formed through disruption, obligation, adoption, loss and unexpected responsibility. The clean, orderly family tree is largely a modern invention; biblical families tend to be complicated enough to require complex diagrams - and lots of head scratching and repeated finger tracing to understand them.

You opened the door and allowed a child’s crisis to become part of your life. That decision will not have removed the damage already done to him and I imagine love has not made every aspect of the journey easy, but it gave abandonment a different ending. He was dropped off at a house and discovered that the house could become a home.

That does not cancel the things you have lost. The arrival of one person never replaces another and the love of a child does not explain the murder of a brother or the end of a career. Life is rarely arranged so neatly. Joy and grief often occupy the same room, occasionally sitting so close together that it becomes impossible to speak about one without disturbing the other.

Job’s story contains that tension. His suffering is real, his questions are real, and so is the continued possibility of life beyond the worst chapter. The ending of Job is sometimes presented as though God simply gave him replacement children and therefore everything was fine, which is an appalling way to read it in my humble opinion. New love does not erase old love and restoration does not make bereavement retroactively painless.

The point is that loss did not have the final word over Job’s capacity to live, love and encounter God.

That is where the closing line of your submission becomes important.

My wife and kids still love me and I love them.

You had every reason to end your message with the uncertainty. You currently have no steady income, your career has ended and you are trying to imagine what comes next after several experiences that would have overwhelmed most people individually, let alone in the cruel and heady cocktail in which you experienced them together.

Yet your final statement was about love.

I do not want to romanticise that or turn it into a slogan. Love does not pay the mortgage, replace your salary or guarantee that the future will become easier. It does, however, reveal that your life cannot be measured solely by the things that have been taken from you.

You remain a husband. You remain a father. You remain a brother, even in bereavement. You remain a teacher in the deeper sense of the word, whether or not a school or college currently employs you. Twenty-five years of knowledge, patience, mistakes, relationships and accumulated wisdom did not vanish when your career ended.

You have also discovered that you love researching art and the Bible, which may appear like a minor detail beside everything else, although I suspect it is not minor at all. Sometimes a new calling arrives without introducing itself as one. It begins as an interest, a curiosity or the only subject that continues to hold your attention while the rest of life feels unstable.

I am not going to announce that God ended your teaching career so you could become a biblical art historian. I have no authority to say that and it would make God sound like an unnecessarily brutal and bullish careers adviser.

I would, however, pay attention to the fact that something in you is still reaching towards beauty, meaning and Scripture.

Job spends much of his story demanding an answer from God, but when God finally speaks, He does not provide the explanation Job requested. Instead, He points towards creation: the foundations of the earth, the morning stars, the sea, the animals and the mysteries Job cannot control. God responds to Job’s suffering with a vision of reality larger than Job’s pain, while never claiming that the pain itself was insignificant.

Perhaps someone who loves art and the Bible may understand that better than most. Art does not always explain suffering, but it can give suffering a shape. It can place grief, beauty, violence, faith and hope within the same frame without pretending they are easily reconciled. Scripture often does the same.

By the end of the book, Job says:

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” — Job 42:5

That verse is sometimes treated as though Job has finally learned to stop complaining. I read it differently. Job has moved from inherited knowledge about God towards an encounter with God that has passed through protest, grief and confusion. He has not received a satisfying account of everything that happened, but his relationship with God has become more direct and more honest.

I wonder whether your own research into Scripture and art is part of that movement. Perhaps you are no longer interested in easy answers because your life has become too complicated for them. Perhaps you are searching for the places where faith can survive contact with reality, including realities as severe as murder, abandonment, unemployment and grief.

Job would be useful company there.

He would not tell you to cheer up. He would not explain your brother’s death or pretend that losing your career was secretly wonderful. In fact, I reckon he would probably be suspicious of anyone who claimed to understand God’s precise plan for your finances or your life.

He would probably recognise the bewilderment of becoming a stranger to your own life and he would understand that faith sometimes consists of continuing the argument because walking away would mean losing the only relationship important enough to argue about.

Most of all, I think Job would notice the same thing I noticed.

After telling me everything that had been taken from you, you told me what remained.

Your wife and children love you. You love them. A little boy who was once dropped at your door now belongs to your family. Your mind is still alive with curiosity, your heart remains capable of responding to beauty and your story has reached a chapter you did not choose without reaching its conclusion.

So, I am assigning you Job, although perhaps not the Job people usually imagine.

You are not being assigned the silent, patient man from the children’s Bible who sits politely on the ground while waiting for God to improve his circumstances. You are being assigned the more accurate Job who refuses to lie about his pain, challenges bad theology, continues speaking to God and gradually discovers that a ruined plan is not the same thing as a ruined life.

I cannot tell you what happens next.

I can tell you that the man who wrote your submission is still loving, learning, researching, raising children and looking for God.

That sounds like somebody whose story is still moving.

God bless you, mate.