The past couple of months, we’ve been living in what I affectionately call our “Book of Job fantasy camp”. Of course, things aren’t as bad for us as they were for Job. God knows we’re not strong enough for that. Hence the fantasy camp. We’re not amongst the spiritually elite, like Job was. We’re just everyday knuckleheads who are only getting a feel for what it’s like to play in the suffering big leagues.
It all started with some leaky basement stairs and a very rainy summer. We found fixing the stairs was going to be a little on the expensive side, so we started saving. Then my husband’s overtime dried up. Then the transmission went out in our truck. Then the oven igniter broke. Luckily, the overtime came back. Then the a/c condenser stopped working while stuck in a heat wave with temperatures in the high 90s. Then the fridge stopped working. Then one of the kids had a medical scare. Then the check engine light came on in my daughter’s car. Then the van’s brakes noticeably needed attention. Then school expenses came up. Then we got a call that the half-a-cow we said we’d buy 6 months before was ready to be butchered (now that we had no money, on account of all the repairs we were having to pay for and also no freezer space, on account of our fridge breaking down). And then my mother wound up in the hospital.
And this all happened pretty much within a week of each other.
It was in the middle of all this going on that I remembered advice I’d gotten as a young adult: “Go limp and go with it.” Which –upon writing this– I noticed really needs the context to not sound kind of sinister.
When I was still new-ish at driving, I got into a decently bad car accident. Though no one was seriously hurt, the next day, it felt like someone had worked me over really hard with a baseball bat.
My mom’s biker friend was over visiting not long after the accident and –being a biker, and having survived a few motorcycle accidents– he had the skinny on the best way to get through a wreck.
“The reason you were so sore afterwards was because you stiffened up before impact,“ he said. “Most people get way more hurt than they would have because they tense up when they anticipate the accident coming. What you need to do is go limp and go with it. Going limp helped me come out of my accidents with only minor injuries.”
Luckily, I was a pretty horrible driver, so it didn’t take long for me to be able to put his advice to good use. I was caravanning home after work with my boyfriend one snowy night (he wanted to make sure I got home safe, having full knowledge of my driving abilities), when off to the right, I noticed a car slipping in the damp snow through a stop sign and heading straight towards me. There was no way out of it for me. With the slippery conditions, I wouldn’t be able to effectively break or quickly speed up. He was going to hit me. Thankfully, I did remember my mom’s friend’s advice and I went limp right before impact and just went with it.
My car was totaled, but I was fine. I couldn’t believe how well the advice worked! (Or that it was even possible to have the presence of mind to put it into practice!). As everything around me was chaos and destruction, I was just going with it and I came out unscathed.
Our going through the Book of Job Fantasy Camp coincidentally (or maybe divine timing) lined up with the Church’s daily readings from the Book of Job. One thing that struck me was that as Job was getting the news about all the calamities happening, each bearer of bad news was not even able to finish speaking before a new one had shown up with more bad news. “While he was yet speaking…” followed by some new destruction wrought on something dear to Job. There was no pause for him to digest that everything he owned was destroyed or stolen before having to hear that all of his children had been killed.
He threw himself on the ground and said, “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”
Which, if you think about it, is the spiritual (and slightly more dramatic) form of “going limp and going with it”. Accepting God’s will, resigning yourself to it and thanking God in all of it. Sometimes, there’s nothing else you can do.
Which is kind of where I found myself in our Book of Job Fantasy Camp. I think that’s why the memory of the advice of my mom’s biker friend popped into my head. We had so much bad luck coming at us from so many directions, there wasn’t really anything we could do except go limp and go with it. And I have to say, once I accepted God’s will and resigned myself to it, I felt a peace that made the fantasy camp much less painful. I just went with it as the calamity and destruction swirled around me in life. I didn’t worry, I didn’t over-think and I made no rushed/rash decisions. When everything settled, we’d taken a ding in our household finances, but everyone was alive and the damage was manageable. Even better, I hadn’t made things worse (as was my usual modus operandi) by tensing up and anticipating.
Saint Therese of Lisieux likened the great saints to towering trees and she, just a little flower. She still received God’s generous light, just closer to the ground. We can’t all be great saints like Job, but sometimes we can experience a taste of great saintliness through a fantasy camp. And that God seems to know we can’t handle a full-on Job experience is further evidence that His will can be trusted. We can go limp and go with it and be at peace that whatever calamity and destruction is swirling around us, accepting God’s will and resigning ourself to it is the least painful way to get through it.
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