Job Goes to the Desert

If you have a morbid fascination with disaster, dear blog readers, read on!

So lately, Job from the bible comes to my mind. He was a good guy, really. Just that he was needed to prove a point in a contest. Happens all the time, only most of us aren't fully aware of it.

I was put on a medication that makes my head spin, as if the pace of my the events of my life these days simply wasn't enough. Even on it, I can see the signs when a contest is afoot, so that's something. If I believed in "shoulds" I should have seen it coming when I opened the bible one day not long ago to a passage from Job. Put me in a hotel room with not much else to do, and you'll find I'll open up the most extraordinary things. The passage was Job 29:25:

"I chose the way for them and sat as their chief; I dwelt as a king among his troops; I was like one who comforts mourners."

It seemed important enough at the time to write it down, and so I did. It's often hard to understand the meaning of things when they're taken out of context. However, I believe the whole of holy books, each word a word of the Creator. So, perhaps there's a meaning for me. We'll get to that later.

So, in the span of a week, a lot has awakened me to the fact that a contest is at hand. I've lost people dear to me. As if that wasn't quite enough, I was served with rebuttal papers shortly before this Job heads off into the desert.

Then, this morning, I discover that my bid for freedom is causing me to hemorrhage $1000.00 per month, much higher than expected. I'm guessing that a cocaine habit or Maserati payment would cost about as much. Either of those, I imagine, would provide a bit of a good time, in comparison to what my bid for freedom is providing me. Still and all, one can't overlook the small joys in life of paying someone to be able to swear around them as much as one needs to. Frankly, if I have to sell my own blood at a blood bank to pay for the cost of my freedom, I'll do it.

As if the medication side effects, loss of family, and cost of my freedom wasn't enough to buy me a clue as to what's going on, a spiritual lady told me yesterday that I've got something bad coming after me. I think my visualization based on what she described was that the gates of Hell had opened up directly over me. She certainly wasn't talking about anything pleasant.

It was probably a bad idea for me to challenge it, thinking:

"Yeah, you and what army?"

Because shortly after that, my son looked up to the skies and said "It looks like an army's building up."

And this is when the words of yet another friend who isn't talking to me these days ring through my head. He'd said something about that God's won the war, and we're just soldiers in the battle. Man knows what he's talking about, I think.

Of course, this all comes shortly before I go west, to the arid regions of Utah. There's a thing about going west, I recall. That the old Cherokee traditionalists didn't want to be removed west during the Trail Where They Cried, because the west was associated with where we go when we die, the Darkening Land.

I don't fear death. For those who've read my take on fears in the last post, they all stem from things that have happened to you in the past and that you don't want a repeat of in your present. And I don't fear the gates of Hell opening up over me either, with the army of Mignon's chasing after my sorry self, if that's got to come to pass, too. The spiritual lady said if there's someone that I trust completely with spiritual stuff, I ought to call that person. I sat there and thought on it, laughed to myself. Yep, you guessed it, that person isn't talking to me either these days.

The thing I didn't have the heart to tell that spiritual lady was that this isn't the first time stuff like this has happened, and it probably won't be the last. I told someone once that I'm like a lightening rod for extremely random potentially dangerous experiences. I wasn't quite thinking of this scenario when I said it, but I'll cut myself some slack for overlooking it on my top 10 list.

Today was a fasting day for me, so I had a lot of time to think on it, and still don't have a plan, but I'm good with it. The two thoughts that came to mind were that may help. One is that I'm descended from some really strong people, and their blood runs through my veins. The other is that when a contest is at hand, you've just got to be clear on what side you're on, and let the Creator take care of the rest.

During my fast, I made a lot of jokes with the Creator about what was going on, many of which have found their way into this blog. I know the Creator's got a great sense of humor, otherwise I'd be living in Hell instead of just having the gates of its portal opening up over my head. We all would, for that matter.

I don't think a lot of people realize what a great sense of humor the Creator has. They miss it as much as they miss the small blessings in their lives, overlooked by the dark clouds that loom over their heads. I don't miss the humor, and I don't miss the blessings, just because an army's after me. They'd have to distract me from the reason I'm here at all, and that's because the Creator made me. They'd have to get me to fear, or to hope, and neither one of those is happening because I've reoriented to the here and now. Best place to be, really, when you're in a battle.

There's an association people have to the Creator, or God, and that God is hope. So when they hear me dismissing hope out of turn, they assume I've turned from God. This is not the case. In my mind, hope is an illusion and the Creator is a fact. If we believed the authenticity of the Creator in all things as fact, a lot of the animosity in the world would simply cease to be. A lot of hearts would be turned from the coldness of their ways.

I don't think I am nearly as good a person as Job was, but what I lack in those areas, I make up in others. The Creator knows this, otherwise this battle wouldn't be going into play.

So I'm off to the deserts of the west and we'll see where this goes next.