Job LXXVI

 If life has no meaning beyond the present, beyond what one can consume, amass, and feel physically, no matter how much time one devotes to the fleeting pleasures of this world, hoping they will suffice as a substitute for the hollowness within, then we should all be equally miserable, despondent, and unhinged from reality. If there is no hope beyond the now and no meaning to life other than to glut ourselves and drown ourselves in wine, then nothing would matter enough to animate us in any fashion or bring us any semblance of joy. It’s why I believe atheists to be the most pitiable, saddest people walking the earth, because to them, this is all there is, and it’s not that grand, and when it’s over, lights out, you’re done, adios and arrivederci. Make sure you have enough in your bank account to cover cremation, and hope some distant relative will take time out of their busy day to spread your ashes somewhere other than the drain.

I get it; if all someone’s got to show for a lived life is a handful of STDs, a once shiny, now rusty convertible, and that one story about when they think they ate blowfish in Japan but suspect it was tuna, the regret they feel is justified. What isn’t justified is their insistence that their life is as good as it gets rather than being the vapid thing it was. It may be the only way they have of coping with their reality, but I don’t have to be party to it. Sorry, Sparky, your life story isn’t aspirational; it’s a cautionary tale. You wasted the life you were gifted pursuing things that left you just as empty after acquiring them as before, and now the end is near, and you’re starting to rethink all the snarky things you said and the mockery you heaped upon those who tried to tell you about a Savior that forgives and restores. Who needs Jesus when you’ve got Jim Beam? Remember that one? You came up with that zinger it all by yourself.

The truth is that people have tried to drown out the still, small voice whispering memento mori, mute it, or smother it with every sin and vice under the sun, but eventually, they lose their appeal and their ability to distract from the ever-present reality of the individual’s mortality. Save for the Lord returning, one day I will die, as will you, and each of us will have to contend with the eternity that follows.

Some have come to terms with their eventual demise. Even so, they try to convince others of their happiness by insisting that they should eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they will die, not realizing that at some point, there will be no tomorrow and that judgment awaits beyond the veil. If money were a valid substitute for meaning and purpose, then no rich people would have a double portion of buckshot for lunch, ever. Yet, they do. Either that, or they leap from bridges and buildings, walk into traffic, take a fistful of pills, hoping it’s the last thing they’ll do, and the list goes on because we grow ever more inventive regarding the means of our own destruction. While some struggle to survive and claw at the dirt in the hope they don’t starve, others who’ve made money their defacto god and surrogate purpose in life can’t wait to leave it all behind and be done with it.

If the things the grinning faces on television telling you will make you happy really did, why are they all so miserable? If there is genuine contentment in fame or fortune, why are they constantly in rehab, on suicide watch, or descending into such debauchery or hedonism as to make a Roman senator during the peak of the empire blush? That fake, plastic smile does nothing to take away from their dead eyes, and you can tell without really trying that the depth of their misery knows no bounds.

It’s not working anymore. The playbook is tattered and worn from overuse, and the minions the enemy employs to drive the narrative that hedonism is the only true joy in life can no longer bring themselves to fake sincerity. We’ve seen previous iterations of Satan’s ambassadors spiral into despair too often to believe anything that comes out of their mouths anymore. Their influence is waning; they’ve lost their grip on being able to construct a believable narrative, and they know it. Those insisting most stringently that they’re happy, they really are, are, in point of fact, the most miserable souls among us.

Money can’t buy you love or sincere affection. It can’t crawl up on your lap and kiss you on the cheek even though your beard is scruffy, and they scrunch up their nose because it tickles. Fancy as it may be, a car can’t crawl into bed next to you for a snuggle and a bedtime story.

The things that matter most in life, the things that bring purpose and joy, meaning and fulfillment, are free not because they’re worthless but because they’re priceless. You can’t put a price on holding your newborn or growing old with the person you love. Conversely, you can’t put a price on salvation either. That’s why God offers it for free to those who receive His Son, believe in Him, and surrender their lives.

When people with no hope mock your hope, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and move on. There are only so many times someone can slap your hand away as you’re trying to pull them from the mire before you realize they don’t want out. They just want to be told the quicksand they find themselves in will not be harmful to their existence, and they get angry when you insist that it will kill them. I’ve been called unloving more times than I can count for doing nothing more untoward than calling sin by name and pointing to the Scriptures as proof and validation of my assertions.

We cannot discount the Word of God just to appease someone’s bruised ego or feelings, just as we can’t call light dark because it’s too bright and makes another squint. The truth of Scripture will win out, and those who trust in the God of the Bible have a sure foundation upon which they can build their spiritual man.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LXXV

 There is a purpose, and there is a plan, even when our human intellect cannot perceive them. If God Himself said that our ways are not His ways, and our thoughts are not His thoughts, then we have to allow for the reality that He will not go about accomplishing something the way we would have, by the same route, or in the same manner.

I keep returning to the idea that we must have absolute trust in the God we serve, and that level of trust can only come about if we know Him. A superficial understanding of the nature and character of God cannot bring you to a place of fully trusting Him. It’s easy to trust when all is well, and things are running smoothly. It’s far more challenging to do it when everything seems to be falling apart, and every avenue you take ends up being a dead-end road.

Sometimes, we ask questions to which we get no answer because we already know the answer; we’re just hoping for a different one. Last year, we got to do something I’d dreamt of doing since the girls were still in diapers. We got to go on a road trip. I know my dreams are simpler than other men’s, but it’s the way I’ve always been. I never dreamt of a Lamborghini, a gold-plated toilet, a palatial estate, or a private jet, but that road trip was something I wanted to do before the good Lord called me home, and it came together quite unexpectedly.

One of my wife’s clients has a condo in Florida, and on a whim, she asked if we wanted to go and spend a week there. Not one to turn down a free week on the beach, even if it was in December, we made the necessary plans, and when discussion of how we’d get there inevitably ensued, I told my wife I wanted to drive. She agreed, albeit grudgingly, and that was the end of that.

I should have known better than to expect my dream of a road trip to match the reality of it, but I was so enthusiastic about the prospect that I didn’t really think it through. Since we left at a little past midnight, the first few hours were everything I’d imagined: Me driving, my kids sleeping in their car seats, and my wife nodding off in the front.

Then the girls woke up, and the constant chorus of “Are we there yet?” started in earnest. Obviously, we weren’t there yet. We’d just gotten into Kentucky, and we had a way to go, but even after I explained it to them, it was as though they were stuck on replay, and every couple of minutes, they’d take turns asking the dreaded question.

At some point, I stopped answering because they already knew the answer. No, we weren’t there yet, and we wouldn’t be for at least another ten hours. If you already know the answer to the question you’re asking God but don’t want to acknowledge it in the hope that you’ll get a different answer, stop asking or be honest enough to tell Him you don’t like the answer He already gave you. However, instead of courting rebellion, my counsel would be to say, Lord, your will be done, and continue your journey of faith.

It’s disingenuous of us to think that God will change His mind on a given issue just because we make a nuisance of ourselves and keep asking the same thing over and over again. The way is the way, and the journey will last for as long as it must because the whole point of a journey is to reach your destination.

We can choose to be soldiers of the cross or temperamental children. We either put on the whole armor of God and defend the truth of the gospel against enemies from without and within or sit in the dust complaining that our piece of cake wasn’t big enough or that we didn’t get the special job we wanted, and let others fight the battle and reap the corresponding rewards.

No, it is not a sin to ask questions. It borders on sin, however, when having already received an answer, we keep asking the same question because we don’t like the answer we got. Either obey or don’t, but tempting God never ends well.

There are plenty of individuals within the contemporary church who’ve talked themselves into believing that they can do as they will and still be pleasing in the sight of God. In modern-day parlance, they believe they can have their cake and eat it too. Such individuals give certain Scriptures a wide berth because they contradict their fallacious beliefs, pretending as though they don’t exist.

One of the most damning passages regarding this mindset is found in the first chapter of Romans, where Paul warns that there are those among the brethren who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator.

Last week, I had to go back to the store and exchange a winter jacket I’d bought for my eldest daughter for a larger size. In order to receive the other jacket, I had to be in possession of the jacket I’d already purchased in order to exchange it. Paul isn’t referring to individuals who never knew the truth or were never in possession of it but who willingly exchanged the truth of God for the lie because they preferred the lie over the truth. It fit them better, and that mattered more to them than whether or not it was godly, truthful, or in line with Scripture.

When we are unwilling to allow the word of God to transform us, and when we bristle at the idea of being molded into a vessel of honor because we prefer to have it our way and reject the truth of Scripture due to its being inconvenient or offensive to the flesh, we choose to shrug off the truth and walk away from it to the cold embrace of the lie. You already know God disapproves; why try to stir His anger by asking if He’s willing to make an exception for you? He is not, and if a voice whispers in your ear that He is, it wasn’t His voice!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXXIV

 Job 3:11-19, “Why did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb? Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should nurse? For now I would have lain still and been quiet, I would have been asleep; Then I would have been at rest with kings and counselors of the earth, who built ruins for themselves, or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver; Or why was I not hidden like a stillborn child, like infants who never saw light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they do not hear the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.”

We are all made equal in death. It doesn’t matter how we started, where we started, how far we got, how high we climbed, what we amassed, what we built, how famous we were, or how infamous; eventually, the grave beckons, the spark of life leaves the body, and we return to the earth from which we came. It takes a lot of pain to conclude that this would have been the best-case scenario for you as a person, wherein you query why it was that you didn’t die at birth.

It’s dark, to be sure, perhaps even unbearably bleak, but it just goes to show that Job was human. He felt pain like you and me, he felt joy like you and me, he felt loss like you and me, and in every way, he was as human as anyone walking the face of the earth today, yet it was within his ability to draw close enough to God and surrender himself to the point that God saw him as blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning evil.

Having been wealthy, Job saw the vanity of it, concluding that the best kings could manage was to build ruins for themselves and hoard and amass gold and silver they would never enjoy. If anything, Job’s discourse puts flesh on the statement Solomon would later make wherein he wrote, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

It shouldn’t go unnoticed that two of the wealthiest men of their generation came to the same conclusion about material things and how impermanent they are. We can either take their counsel to heart or ignore it and go through the trauma of discovering the truth of their assertions on our own. Most people are stubborn and stiff-necked, thinking they can have a different outcome than those who came before them by doing the exact same thing. They won’t, but it will be years before they realize it. Then, rather than admit they were wrong, they’ll double down and keep pressing on to try to acquire things that bring them neither joy nor fulfillment.

Job’s grief followed its natural course. It’s not as though the inflection point of his life was delayed; his reaction to it was. After the shock of an unforeseen disaster wears off, the laments and lamentations begin, and once those are no more, the questions begin in earnest. The difference between Job’s questions and the questions of others in similar, if not comparable, situations is that while Job wondered out loud why he had not died at birth or perished when he came from the womb, most people walking about today would ask why tragedy had befallen them.

Job’s questions were of an existential nature rather than why a good God would allow evil to befall him, a man who had done his all to be upright in his conduct. This is not a distinction without a difference. We were told in the previous chapter that Job did not sin with his lips or charge God with wrong.

His stated position was that whether good or adversity, we must accept all things from God. That doesn’t mean he didn’t feel the pain or the loss, nor does it mean he was expected to be cheerful in his adversity and do cartwheels when the painful boils covered his entire body, but that he had settled in his heart that whatever came from the hand of God must be accepted without finding fault with Him.

It’s a tall order. Yes, I can sit here and pontificate, perhaps even wax poetic, but the reality is that while I’ve never gone through a season of trial wherein I found fault with God, I did wonder why He allowed it in my life. I had to determine whether it was a blessing, a test, or a correction and proceed accordingly.

The hardest one to wrap my mind around by far is a trial that, in the long run, turns out to be a blessing. You can’t see it when you’re in it. It’s near impossible to make sense of it, and while your mind is racing to find explanations, your spiritual man is insisting that you be still and know peace.

Before I met my wife, I was betrothed to another. For those of you not familiar with Shakespearean English, that means engaged. She was a pastor’s daughter, seemingly upstanding and of virtuous moral fiber, and wedding plans were well on their way before her cousin, of all people, called me while I was in the US, warning me that she’d been stepping out and had gotten serious with someone while I’d been away. It devastated me utterly. It was the only time in my life when I came close to having a panic attack. All the well-laid plans, dreams of a future with her as my wife, the conversations we’d had about how many children we wanted, and all the minutia that went along with courting someone went up in smoke and became as bitterness on my tongue in an instant.

I went to my grandfather, the only man I sought counsel from when things went sideways unexpectedly, and after telling him the story, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sometimes blessings don’t seem like blessings until you realize how much of a blessing they were.”

I respected him too much to give a flippant answer, but I had a few on deck in the back of my mind. I was heartbroken and near to despondent, and he was giving me fortune cookie anecdotes. Yes, I know, you can either curse the rain or buy an umbrella. If the sun is too bright, find a shady spot. You can’t drink water from a strainer. Got it, thanks. I thought it, but I didn’t say it.

During my next trip to Romania, I met the girl who would become my wife. In hindsight, twenty-five years in, with two beautiful daughters to show for it, I realize how much of a blessing my heartbreak was, and I thank God every day for it. Just because there is pain attached to an event or experience, it doesn’t mean it’s not a blessing in disguise or that it will not work together for good. Trust God. He knows what He’s doing.

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LXXIII

 The potter not only determines the shape or form the clay will take, but he also determines the timing of when the vessel is put into the fire and how long it remains there. None of those things are within my purview or yours. The only thing incumbent upon us, the only thing we have control over, is to not resist the molding process and give God free reign of our lives in all things. Whatever it is we attempt to hold back will be an ever-present hindrance in our relationship with God. All things means all things, even those things your flesh pines over or feels entitled to.

If you’ve ever watched a potter mold a piece of clay, you know it’s not a gentle process. Even before he begins to work the clay into some discernable shape, the potter kneads it, flattens it, folds it over on itself, and kneads it anew until it has the desired consistency. Only then does he begin to form the clay into a vessel of his choosing. All the while, the clay remains silent. The clay does not resist the kneading of the potter in any way but submits wholly to the process required for it to be transformed into something more than just a piece of clay.

I am neither the captain of my own ship nor am I the master of my destiny. You cannot possess such a grandiose mindset and still humble yourself to the point of submitting to the authority of God in all things. I am a servant called to serve. That’s the extent of my titles. I have a Master and I defer to Him, obey Him, and follow Him, knowing that obedience is worth eminently more than any sacrifice I may bring before Him. He does as He wills with my life, and I can rest in that knowledge because I know Him to be a good and gracious Master. The road may not always be easy, and at certain points, it can get downright treacherous, but the knowledge of who He is keeps me surefooted and at peace.

You cannot serve God without trusting Him. You cannot commit your way unto the Lord unless you love the Lord of the way. We’re constantly bombarded with new and inventive ways to get things from God, to twist His arm to do our bidding, without having established true intimacy with Him and without having a proper understanding of our relationship with Him. Save your fifty bucks for the online course on how to fast your way to wealth and buy someone hungry a hot meal instead. At least you’ll be storing up treasures in heaven and not subsidizing the lifestyle of an ignominious ghoul who sees you as nothing more than a piggy bank.

In case you were wondering, no, it doesn’t work. You can’t trick God into doing something contrary to His nature or something detrimental to your spiritual man even though your flesh really wants it. Some people get bitter because they want boatloads of money and never get it, never once, considering that in having acquired the wealth, their desire for God will fizzle out altogether. We don’t like to acknowledge the reality that perhaps God is doing us a favor by not giving us what we desire since it would dampen and diminish our desire for Him.

There is only one thing in this life that we can desire that God is ever willing to give us more of, and that’s Himself. But that’s not fair! Look at all these heathens burning through money as though it had an expiration date. Some guy just spent over six million dollars for a banana duct taped to a wall, which he then ate, and I’m having to sift through my car, hoping to find enough pocket change to get a gallon of gas for my Pinto. How’s that fair?

If life were about our time here on earth rather than eternity, it wouldn’t be. It’s not, though. That the contemporary church has managed to shift its focus from the things above to the things of this earth is not only detrimental and destructive but also the genesis of much bitterness in the hearts of those who ought not to be troubled or concerned about tomorrow. Say it with me: It’s not about this life, but the life to come.

It doesn’t matter how many bananas someone buys for millions of dollars; at the end of the day, we all end up in a box, in the dirt, nevermore to take a lungful of air or see another sunrise. Prince or pauper, the only difference between the two is how nice the box is. That’s when this flicker of a life ends, and eternity begins, and as is most often the case, once eternity begins to unwind, location is everything. Obsessing over things you can’t take with you is a wasted life without any purpose beyond the handful of years you’re given to walk this earth. Eternity and where we will spend it should be at the forefront of our thoughts and actions, knowing that the time we have here is finite and fleeting, and once it’s done, there is no rewind button.

There are no redos; you can’t start over again and wish as we may to go back and redeem the time we wasted in pursuit of something other than eternity; it’s impossible. We tend to dwell on the things we can’t change as an excuse and delaying tactic to put off the things we can. It’s not a natural byproduct of human nature. It’s the enemy’s way of trying to run out the clock because he knows there is no hope of redress after we have gone from this earth. What we do with the handful of years we’ve been given while we are here will determine where we spend eternity. For some, this is a reason for rejoicing; for others, it is a source of constant dread.

No one has looked back on their lives and wished they’d served God less, obeyed Him less or trusted Him less. Even when faced with their imminent demise at the hands of their executioners, those who established the Lord in their hearts and surrendered their will to His did so joyfully, knowing the reward which awaited them. Things that matter, matter, and nothing matters more than knowing that you’ve been bought with a price, saved and sanctified, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, born again in Him, through Him, and by Him.

When we lay hold of this truth, the things of this earth, the trials of this present life, the testings, and the hardships will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. This is why we can retain the joy of the Lord amid sorrow and the peace that surpasses all understanding amid chaos.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LXXII

 Unless you’ve gone through it, the best any of us can hope for is an abstract understanding of what the sifting is. The reality of it, its crushing weight, and the constant buffeting with seemingly no end in sight must be experienced in order to be understood. It’s like someone explaining the difficulties of crossing the Atlantic on a single-passenger sailboat. Sure, you can get an idea of the level of difficulty with being alone on the stormy seas for weeks on end, but unless you’ve experienced the sunburn, cracked lips, anxiousness, isolation, seasickness, and privation, you only know the half of it.

There’s a reason ‘you had to be there to understand’ is a saying. Some things cannot be adequately explained unless they are experienced, and nothing less than the experience will suffice.

The notion of being sifted is not exclusive to Job or even to the Old Testament. It’s not a practice God decided to do away with or no longer allow because the idea of it didn’t poll well when it was peer-reviewed. The misconception that God is somehow subject to our feelings and emotions is ludicrous on its face but ever popular in the modern-day church. We’ve talked ourselves into believing that since we have no appetite for suffering, sifting, or testing, God’s just going to eliminate those things from our lives.

Luke 22:31-32, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Okay, fine, so two guys. One in the Old Testament and one in the New. That doesn’t make it a common practice, does it? Read those two verses carefully, and you’ll realize it’s not just two guys. It wasn’t just Job and Simon, who would later be known as Peter. Satan had asked to sift all of them as wheat. Jesus singled out Simon in telling him that he’d been praying for him that his faith would not fail, yet as far as the sifting goes, Satan had asked to sift all of them.

Being sifted and having Satan ask to sift the servants of God is not an exception but the rule. These were the guys, Christ’s inner circle, those whom He called by name and spent the last three years of His life ministering with, yet when Satan asked that they be sifted, his request was not denied. Jesus didn’t say Satan asked to sift all of you as wheat, but I got your back and told him no.

Knowing what the future held for Peter, knowing he would deny Jesus three times before the rooster crowed that day, knowing how wrecked he would be once that happened, Jesus encouraged him the only way He could: by telling him, He’d prayed that his faith might not fail.

God determines how far He will let Satan go and the lengths to which he will sift a given individual, but at some point in life, most of us go through it. Are there exceptions? I’m sure there are, but I haven’t met one yet. The firing process makes clay stronger. Without it, it remains fragile and porous. If you are determined to serve God, if Jesus is established on the throne of your heart, the day will come when Satan will ask to sift you.

In that moment, all you have is the faith and trust you’ve built up over the course of your spiritual walk and nothing more. When the sifting begins, it’s too late to grow, press in, mature, or deepen your understanding of the God you serve. Peter already possessed faith; Jesus prayed that his faith would not fail.

We put off the important things, thinking we have forever to implement them, nurture them, and grow them. We know having a prayer life is necessary for the health of our spiritual man, but something always comes up, and we delay the consistent practice of going before God and having fellowship with Him until something happens, and all the distractions melt away, and we find ourselves with nothing but time to sit in our prayer closets, weep and groan and call out to Him pleading for an intervention of some sort. Where were you before the storm clouds? Where were you before the thing that made your world turn on its ear happened in an instant?

Situational relationships are nothing more than usury. If the only time I approach God is when I need something from Him, it’s neither love nor the desire to know Him fueling my pursuit but rather desperation. Seek to know God, make time for Him, and fellowship with Him with as much enthusiasm and desire during your days of plenty as you would in your time of famine, and when the time of famine arrives, He will be present without having been called.

If we think we can ignore God for six days out of the week and pay Him lip service on the seventh, and that’s all it takes to have a firmly rooted relationship with Him, we’re fooling ourselves. I have a friend who’s a bit on the chunky side and doesn’t take care of himself at all until the week before he’s due for his annual physical. That’s when he gets serious, cuts out the sugar and the carbs, starts to move beyond his front door, and gets a little exercise in the hope that he can fool the blood analysts into giving him a clean bill of health. I keep telling him that’s not the way it works, but my counsel falls on deaf ears because he insists it’s worked in the past, and so it will again. That level of self-delusion will eventually be shattered, but by then, it will be too late.

You don’t get on a flight and only then consider packing a bag. By the time the doors on the plane close and you’re taxiing for takeoff, it’s already too late. You must possess faith, know the character of the God you serve, learn to trust Him and establish your heart to be faithful to the end long before you find yourself on a proverbial ash heap scratching at yourself with a potsherd. Your spiritual man needs something to tap into as he is being buffeted. He needs a strong foundation from which he will not be moved, and the onus is on us to redeem the time and do what we must in order to ensure that we have done all to stand.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXXI

 Recent studies have shown that the loneliest people on the planet live in the biggest cities. The more skyscrapers, apartment buildings, businesses, restaurants, subways, and the hustle and bustle of everyday life one is surrounded by, the lonelier and more detached they seem to be. It’s counterintuitive to the point of being illogical when you think about it. One would expect that the more they’re surrounded by other people, the less lonely they’ll be because the opportunity to make new friends is compounded with every hundred or so individuals within a certain radius.

Evidently, this is not the case. You’re more likely to make friends in a small, out-of-the-way town in the middle of South Dakota than you are living in Manhattan surrounded by all the other worker bees trying to get ahead and living in a world of their own. The one word that came up over and over again when people who participated in these studies were asked why they thought this was the case was community. The smaller the town you live in, the likelier it is that there is a strong sense of community, with neighbors helping neighbors rather than trying to set their cat on fire because it relieved itself on their lawn.

One of the devil’s biggest goals is to separate and discombobulate the body of Christ to the point that we are no longer one body but a tub full of body parts independent of each other, trying to do on our own only what an entire body can accomplish. A healthy body is interdependent upon all its members. Although the head may think itself of paramount importance, it needs the fingers and the hand to feed it in order to survive. The hands and fingers need the feet to take them to where the food is, the hands and feet need the eyes and the nose to tell them where the food is and if it’s edible, and once the food is masticated, making use of the mouth, the teeth and the throat, the digestive system has to work properly for the body to extract the necessary nutrients, and eliminate the rest.

Every time we touch upon this subject, there is bound to be someone who writes in insisting that no church body is good enough for them or that they have a hard time finding a fellowship, but lest we forget, where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there. I’ve been to church meetings in barns, garages, living rooms, and someone’s basement, where the presence of God was more evident than in any multi-million-dollar sanctuary I’ve ever come across. Just as the clothes don’t make the man, and I know that’s contrary to the modern adage but is nevertheless true, the opulence of the building or the size thereof doesn’t make the body.

Some of the scummiest, most disingenuous, duplicitous, underhanded, self-serving, callous people I’ve ever encountered were very well dressed, replete with the mandatory silk tie and the matching pocket square. Lawyers come to mind, and unfortunately, I’ve had to deal with a handful of those throughout my life.

Conversely, some of the most honest, down-to-earth, empathetic people I’ve been graced to know likely had one suit hanging in their closet, and that was there just in case they went to the great beyond and needed something to be buried in. When I get around to writing my will, I will specify that I want to be buried in shorts and the raggedy shirt I wear most mornings as I sit and write. No, clothes don’t make a man; his character and the content thereof, his principles, his honesty, and his consistency are what make a man.

We get taken in by the packaging and never bother to check what’s inside the box. Sure, the wrapping paper and the bows are nice to look at, but when it comes down to it, it’s what’s inside that gives it value.

Shortly after the revolution in Romania, we began traveling back to the homeland to help where we could and as we were able. My grandfather’s first trip back was in the early part of 1990, and we paid the extra cost for ten suitcases worth of Bibles to be shipped along on his flight. Those Bibles had been sitting in the suitcases for close to a year, taking up a corner of our already cramped apartment’s living room because God had told him he’d be going back and he’d be bringing Bibles along.

One of the many things I respected about my grandfather was his absolute and unwavering trust in God. If God told him to do something, he set his hand to the plow, not wondering how what he was told would come about or fretting about the impossibility of it in the present moment. Our entire family had been deported with specific orders never to return on pain of death. When he purchased the Bibles and the suitcases, the communists were still in power, and there wasn’t even a stirring among the populace, never mind a full-blown revolution.

After his first trip back, the day he arrived in Fullerton, he sat the family down and told us we’d be building churches in Romania. Although, at the time, we didn’t have the money, the money came in, and the next hurdle was getting it to Romania. This was before wire transfers were available since the country was still in upheaval and years before international banks hungry for profit opened up branches in-country. The only way to get the money into the country to buy the materials we would need for the churches God had told him to build was to carry cash.

To look at him, in his plaid shirt and baggy wool pants, no one would have thought this man was carrying six figures in US legal tender on his person, yet he was. If clothes made the man and hinted at his value, one would likelier hand him a dollar to buy himself a cup of tea than conclude he was carrying enough coin to buy an entire apartment building with money to spare in those days. We ended up building close to sixty churches throughout Romania in the early years after the revolution because the dollar went a long way back then, and the labor force was plentiful.

God sees what men cannot, and He judges by His standard rather than men’s standards. Never allow someone’s appearance to determine how you view them or the sort of value you assign to them. Whether scruffy, unkempt, well-dressed, or otherwise, we are all children of God. Too often, we let the wrapping dictate our reaction to someone long before what’s inside can come to the fore and present itself.

No one walking by, likely giving him a wide berth, would have thought that Job was a blameless and upright man whom God favored; it would have been the furthest thought from their mind. If they’d known of him before his testing, when he was the greatest people of the East, their likely reaction would have been to wonder what he had done to displease God so that he had come to such ruin. It’s not so much not trusting what your eyes see; it’s passing judgment based on what your eyes alone see that’s the problem.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXX

 Job 3:4-10, “May that day be darkness; may God above not seek it, nor the light shine upon it. May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; may a cloud settle on it; may the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, may darkness seize it; may it not rejoice among the days of the year, may it not come into the number of the months. Oh, may that night be barren! May no joyful shout come into it! May those curse it who curse the day, those who are ready to arouse Leviathan. May the stars of its morning be dark; may it look for light, but have none, and not see the dawning of the day; because it did not shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide sorrow from my eyes.”

The invocation of death continues for the first ten verses of the third chapter. It is not an easy, lighthearted read, and the only way to perceive it is to weigh Job’s words against the pain he is currently feeling. It’s one thing to say, “Lord, the road is hard, and I am weary,” it’s quite another to curse the day you were born and wish that it were darkness and no light shine upon it.

Although you couldn’t get any lower than Job’s current state, Satan still didn’t get what he was after, which was Job cursing God and finding fault with Him. Satan did not consider Job’s words a victory, even though they are the groans and heart cry of a man who sees no spark of joy in his existence, because his objective wasn’t to make Job sad or depressed but to disavow himself of God altogether, and deem Him unworthy of the faithfulness and devotion he showed throughout the years.

The devil’s goal isn’t to separate you from your material possessions or your health; to him, they are a means to an end, the end being you turning your back on God. If your joy, peace, purpose, and outlook on life are tethered in the temporal, in the material, or even in your own physical wellbeing, when these things are shaken, and they begin to crumble before your eyes, you will likewise be shaken in your resolve and devotion to God. If, however, you are tethered in God and draw your strength and fulfillment from Him, then nothing will shake your faithfulness when the things of this earth are no more.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. It is one of those immutable and absolute realities that prove themselves, and no matter how often men say otherwise, it is nevertheless true. If your heart yearns for God alone, then by that very act, you’ve neutralized close to all of the enemy’s fiery arrows and means of attack. There are still a handful to contend with after you’ve directed the desire of your heart toward the heavenly things, but far less than if you were still pining for the material, the fool’s gold of the here and now that has no permanence or place in the eternal.

When all is stripped away, yet God remains, and you discover He is sufficient, you cling to Him all the more. In order for God to remain, He had to have been present. He will meet you where you are, in your grief, in your loss, in your shame, as long as you’re not busy chasing after the things that have slipped through your fingers and ignoring His presence.

Some men insist that they can’t find God, even though they’ve never actively searched for Him. The pursuit of their entire existence has always been something other than discovering the majesty of God’s presence, yet, somehow, they lay the blame at God’s feet for never having encountered Him.

Matthew 7:7-11, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”

When we sincerely desire something or someone, we pursue it with abandon. When we desire God and not the things that men tell us will be bestowed to us as a result of knowing Him, everything falls by the wayside, and He becomes our singular goal and object of affection. The beauty of desiring to know God is that He doesn’t play hard to get. God is not coy, demure, or coquettish; He’s not dragging us along until a better opportunity presents itself. He promised that if we seek Him, we will find Him, and if we knock, the door will be opened to us. It is because of this promise that we can approach Him with confidence, knowing that if we ask Him for truth, He will not give us a lie, and if we ask Him for life, He will not give us death.

We tend to overthink the dynamics of our relationship with God, and plenty of individuals are willing to needlessly complicate it and insist it couldn’t be so simple because it serves their ends. All of you for all of Him. That’s the contract. There aren’t fifty pages of fine print you have to wade through; there are no clauses for preexisting conditions or mitigating circumstances that would make the contract null and void. God is faithful. He keeps His word. He will not renege nor walk away when the going gets tough. He is an ever-present help in times of trouble and a comfort in times of heartache. Run to Him. Cling to Him. Trust in Him, and you will never be alone again.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXIX

 A lighthouse will always remain in a permanent fixed position. Depending on where the sailor is upon the roaring sea, however, it may seem farther or closer, off to the left or the right, but as far as the lighthouse itself, there is an unwavering permanence to it, no matter the time of year, how bad the weather, or how dark the night. The darker the night, the brighter the lights of the lighthouse, acting as a beacon and a point of reference to all upon the seas. The same goes for God and our individual relationships with Him. He is a fixed point, permanent and unwavering, yet depending on where we are in our journey, He may seem nearer or far. If He seems far, it is our duty and responsibility to draw closer to Him, and if the desire of our heart is that nearness, He will facilitate it because He is a good God.

Once they see the light of His love, wise men make their way toward Him, understanding that there is peace and joy in the light, there is wholeness and fulfillment, and comfort only He can provide. The light is never far from those who seek it. It does not hide itself; it does not dim in its intensity, nor does it attempt to conceal its illumination. Those who insist they cannot see it need only to open their eyes. The light of God is ever-present, but men choose to avert their gaze, pretend as though it’s not there, or insist that it’s something other than what it is because once you come to the light, it not only exposes the darkness of the heart but demands that the darkness be cast aside. Both cannot coexist in a closed space. Light and darkness are sworn enemies, and neither will relent until one is wholly subdued.

Job didn’t start out lightheartedly and escalated from there. There was no lightheartedness left in him, and all he knew in his current state was pain and grief. From the moment he opened his mouth, he poured out his grief, leaving no room for doubt or debate about how he currently felt. Because most of us have never been in such a dire state as to wish for death, it’s hard to relate to one such as Job on a personal level. I’ve sat alone with my thoughts for more than one entire morning trying to imagine what I would have to endure to come to that point in life, and it’s not an exercise I would recommend. Just thinking about what it would take is soul-crushing, never mind having to go through it.

We can view Job’s monologue from a position of spiritual superiority, looking down on the man and his declaration of cursing the day he was born, writing it off as weakness and lack of spiritual fortitude, or sympathizing with his state of mind taking into account all that he’d endured up to this point.

When you know someone’s going through the fire, make allowances for their grief. It’s the best advice I can give, especially when considering that your time in the fire may be just around the corner, and when you switch places with the individual contending with the pain of loss and hardship, you’d prefer that they show empathy rather than belittle you for not being so strong as to be unaffected by your current circumstance.

Doing unto others as we would have them do to us extends beyond being charitable, giving a glass of water, or buying a meal for someone. When we consider how we would like others to react to situations had we been the ones going through them, it tends to take the self-righteous air out of our quick temper or inclination to pour salt on their already painful wound.

Keep in mind Job did not sin. It wasn’t about calling out sin or bringing someone who had strayed back on the path; it was about pain and loss and grief. There are times when we must be direct and call someone out for the choices they’ve made, and there are times when we should be there for them, grieve with them, and be a shoulder upon which they can cry. It is wisdom itself to know which is which and act accordingly.

Some years back, I had a friend who would say the most hurtful things at the most inappropriate of times, and he would always follow up by saying, “I’m just being honest.” When a mutual friend showed up to lunch with a cast on his leg, after asking what had happened and being informed they’d fallen off their bike, rather than show empathy or compassion, his response was, “You should have known you’re too fat to ride a bike, I’m just being honest.” Granted, the friend who’d broken his leg was on the heavier side, but nothing so close as to render him incapable of riding a bicycle. I could see the hurt in his eyes when the comment was made, but the conversation transitioned to other topics, so nobody said anything.

A few days passed, and I got a call from my rude friend, asking if I could give him a ride from the hospital. I asked what had happened, and he told me he’d broken his ankle. I informed him I’d be there in ten minutes. After getting him situated in the car and making sure he was comfortable, I asked how it had happened. He sheepishly informed me that he was stepping off a sidewalk and didn’t notice the pothole in the street, to which I said, “You should probably watch where you’re going; I’m just being honest.”

I said it in gest, with a smile on my face, but his face turned ashen, and he remained silent for the rest of the drive. Most people who dish it out can’t take it, but sometimes, it’s good to give them a taste of their own medicine just to show them how their words affect others when they’re in the midst of hardship or struggle. It’s offputting when someone justifies being mean-spirited and hurtful by insisting it’s what their honesty demands. You chose to speak the words you spoke in the manner you spoke them. It wasn’t honesty that compelled you to do it but some latent bitterness with which you must contend.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LXIII

 The entirety of the third chapter of Job is divided between laments and lamentations and questions Job continues to ask, to which he receives no answers. It’s hard to reconcile what we hear passing for Scripture nowadays, wherein men insist that God becomes more of a permanent butler and wish granter than Lord and King of your life, and what we see His servants and ones such as Job whom He considered blameless and upright had to endure in their lives.

For most people, the difference between what they hear from the pulpit as to what their expectations should be as believers and the lives of those who came before them isn’t a contradiction; it’s an oversight.

Telling people that pain and loss, grief and tears, are part of the human experience and cannot be avoided unless you’re permanently attached to a tank of nitrous oxide isn’t quite as inviting as telling them that from this day forward, they’ll be blessed coming and going, sleeping and waking, regardless of whether it’s beneficial to their spiritual man or not. The flesh has become a de facto god, and the priests thereof are quick to serve it and make it feel at ease whenever called upon to do so.

When anyone dares to bring up the point that Jesus Himself said that in this world, we would have tribulation, they’re quick to insist that He meant it exclusively for His disciples, sort of like the Holy Spirit, who He likewise said would be with us and in us until the end of time.

If love for God and the presence of God is not indwelling in the heart of man, then man will seek to serve his heart rather than God. Knowing that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, it’s likely that you may not want to go where it leads or give in to its desire because it will ultimately end in destruction.

I don’t mean to spoil it for anyone, but the Bible never says to follow your heart. I know, it’s a game changer. So many arguments within the household of faith could have been averted altogether if the parties in contention had agreed to let the Word of God have the final say.

I believe I have a decent enough poker face. By that, I mean I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, nor do I foreshadow my emotions. There is perhaps one person in the world who knows what I’m thinking at any given moment, and that’s my wife. We’ve been together long enough that I don’t have to emote or have any outward reaction to anything in order for her to know exactly what’s going through my mind. That said, whenever I hear someone begin their argument with the ever-irrelevant “I Feel,” especially when it comes to heretofore-established biblical matters, I can’t help but roll my eyes. It’s instinctual, and I’ve been in conferences where it’s been noticed.

There is a difference between feeling your hurt, feeling your pain, feeling your loss, and allowing those feelings to dictate how you react toward God and your fellow man. God did not create man to be an unfeeling robot. He created man with the ability to connect, to love, to laugh, to cry, to mourn, to feel triumph and loss, to cheer on the accomplishments of their progeny when they progress, and their cello and violin playing no longer sounds like someone is abusing a cat, and feel disappointment when they choose to eat an entire bag of fun size Snicker’s in one sitting even though they knew better.

Job was verbalizing his feelings, his pain, and his grief, but he did not allow them to overtake his senses and use them as a justification to sin against God, whether in word or deed.

1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”

Temptation comes in many forms. It’s not just that leftover piece of chocolate cake in the fridge that’s tempting you in the wee hours of the morning. Such temptations are easy to resist because you just close the refrigerator door and go on with your day. The more nefarious temptations are the ones you can’t walk away from, those stewing in the back of your mind, whether it’s resisting the will and purpose of God for the struggles of life or questioning His sovereignty when the unexpected and unplanned happens, and everything around you seems to fall apart.

There have been moments in life where the urge to try and solve a problem on my own rather than waiting patiently upon the Lord was near to overwhelming. It’s a battle of the mind and one that is taxing beyond belief because the flesh is essentially at war with the will of God, and one must win out.

With every act of submission, with every heart cry of “Your will be done,” it becomes easier to trust God in all things because hindsight will make it clear that had you tried to do it on your own, it would have had disastrous results. Had I tried on my own, I would have failed. Even though my plan was logical, well-reasoned, and, at the moment, seemed like a viable remedy, looking back and seeing how God went about solving it humbled me and made me trust Him all the more.

A man’s way may seem right to him, but unless it’s God’s way, no matter how well thought out his way may be, that man is courting disaster and destruction. When we are humble enough to submit to God’s authority in all things and allow Him to guide us, He will make the crooked ways straight, and the trials that once seemed insurmountable will become a reason to glorify Him.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXII

 There is bound to be someone in everyone’s life who is quick to remind them of who they were before they encountered Christ. Whether it’s a misguided attempt to keep you humble or they’re just trying to bring you down a peg, when someone insists on dragging up who you were and inferring that it’s still who you are, your only reaction should be to continue picking up your cross, walking humbly with your Lord, and working out your salvation with fear and trembling.

Trying to convince someone that you’re a different person when they’re set on remembering you as you were, without allowing for the possibility that you are a new creature, is an exercise in futility. They will not see you as God sees you, as having been reconciled to Him, because they don’t want to.

In the early 90s, our ministry funded, participated in, and put on a lot of crusades in Romania. Communism had fallen, the gospel was free to be preached wherever someone would rent you a hall, and it didn’t take a genius to see that the harvest field was plentiful. Since it was not about an individual person but rather about preaching the gospel to the lost and highlighting Jesus, we made use of local pastors and preachers whenever possible. More often than not, my grandfather was there as an auxiliary, either praying for people or passing out Bibles, but as far as the preaching went, he was happy to let the local brethren do the heavy lifting.

On one such night, we were in Tirgu Frumos, back before they fixed the roads a good hour’s drive from Botosani, and we’d just gotten done with a crusade where the local church pastor had preached. He was a man well into his fifties, and just by the look of him, you could tell he had a past. His nose had been broken at some point and hadn’t been set right, likely more than once, since it was ridged and flattened, giving him the look of a bulldog. He was broad-chested, with that hunched-over appearance guys who wrestle tend to adopt, and if not for the light in his eyes, one would be hard-pressed to stay on the same side of the sidewalk if they saw him coming from the opposite direction.

As we were shaking hands and saying our goodbyes, getting ready to go back home, a man walked up to the pastor and poked a finger into his chest.

“What makes you better than me? I remember when we used to get drunk together, and I couldn’t even hold a candle to you; what gives you the right? How do I know this isn’t all a farse? Are we just supposed to take your word that you’ve changed?”

Every couple of words, as if to emphasize his point, the man would poke the pastor in the chest. His voice got progressively louder, and his jabs more violent, but the pastor didn’t move; he didn’t back away or try to constrain the man and his stabbing finger in any way.

 When the man stopped long enough to catch his breath, the pastor looked into his eyes and, in a soft voice, said, “You and I both know that if I were still the man I used to be, you’d have a broken finger and a few less teeth. Now do you want to have a conversation, or do you want to keep poking me in the chest?”

I could see the wheels spinning, the man’s realization that had this now pastor been the man he’d known before, he likely wouldn’t be standing. taking a step back and arching his brows, he said, “I’ll take the conversation if you don’t mind.”

When we surrender, submit, repent, and begin the journey of denying ourselves and picking up our crosses, we’re not simply identifying as Christians; we are becoming Christ-like in every area of our lives. We are being transformed from glory to glory into the image of Christ. If the extent of our Christianity is claiming that we are Christian, while none of the transformation is taking place within and without, we will be counted among those who say Lord, Lord, but whom He never knew.

There is no sin in remembering where we once were and acknowledging how far God has brought us. Every journey has a starting point, even the journey of faith. We don’t look back at the starting line with longing or a desire to return to it but merely to gauge how far we’ve come while keeping our eyes firmly affixed to the finish line.

Even one such as Paul wasn’t shy about owning up to what he had been, admitting in his letter to the Galatians that he once persecuted without mercy the church of God and did his best to destroy it. He could have obfuscated or whitewashed his past, but what would be the point? He was no longer the man he had been, and now, rather than seek to destroy it, he made it his life’s mission to grow the church and comfort the brethren. That’s what God does. That is the transformative power of His presence in the heart of man, and to take that glorious transformation and say it’s no longer required, but that all we need do is say a few words and raise a hand at a crusade is not only foolhardy but unbiblical.

Matthew 7:21-23, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”

What does this have to do with Job? Only that his relationship with God and the faith that he’d built up over the years aided him in weathering the storm when it would have utterly broken any other man and brought them to the point of sinning against God with their lips. It’s who you are in Christ that will give you the strength to abide, endure, and persevere, not who you are in yourself.

It doesn’t matter how tough and strong we think we are in our constitution, how high of a pain threshold we have, or how unaffected we are by the circumstances of life; without God, everyone breaks at some point. With God, however, all things are possible.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LXI

I can’t say I’ve ever been so low as to curse the day I was born. Job was. It’s easy to sit in judgment and find reasons to look down on the man or say he was being overly dramatic, but if you’ve never walked a mile in someone’s shoes, then your judgment is unfounded. I can’t quantify another’s pain, nor can you quantify mine. It is relational to me alone, and only God knows it fully. Each of us carries a unique burden of pain, a weight only we and God can truly understand.

Sometimes, a man’s countenance and what’s going on in his heart are two wholly different things. It’s guaranteed that you’ve run across someone who put on a brave face and smiled at you while their heart was in turmoil, a vortex of grief and pain that had you seen, you would have recoiled from. On occasion, you get the sense of it, whether it’s a look in their eyes or the fact that the smile is contrary to their overall countenance, but more often than not, we ignore it because we all have our own problems, our own grief, our own disappointments in life, and we’ve been conditioned to turn off our empathy for those around us while expecting them to show it at the slightest need.

No man is an island, but those who deem themselves the overlords of molding society would love nothing more. It’s easier to control someone who has no tribe, no friends, no one they can rely upon, confide in, or pour their hearts out to. They want to be the ones you run to, and they’re quick to offer you the drug cocktail du jour to numb you to the point of indifference toward everything that’s going on around you. Take this fistful of pills, and you won’t feel the grief anymore. Will it make it go away? No, it will still be there, but rather than dealing with it, going through it, letting time heal the wound, we’ll just numb all of you, and you’ll feel nothing at all. Of course, there’s a cost; there always is, and in this case, the cost is your lucidity, your self-awareness, your sense of purpose, and your peace.

Counterfeit peace or counterfeit joy are just that, counterfeit. They’re fake, they’re not real, and as soon as you run out of your prescription, the grief returns fivefold because it’s been building up with no pressure valve to release it and no true comfort to lessen it. What the world offers is not a cure but a way to manage it. The only one who can deliver on the promise of healing a broken heart is God, even if it takes time to do it. Wounds take time to heal. When you cut your finger, even if you wash out the wound, lather it in Neosporin, and bandage it, it won’t heal overnight, even though the healing process has already begun. You don’t go back to the wound, open it up, squeeze the sides, and make it bleed every few hours, wondering why it’s not healing. You do what you can do to keep it from getting infected, then let time do its thing and scab it over, then let it heal altogether, then when it’s done, you’ll have the scar to remind you of it for the rest of your days. Healing takes time, but it does come.

Scars remind us of the wounds we’ve suffered and the valleys God has carried us through. They’re a permanent reminder that God can bind up the wound and heal the broken heart because He’s already done it, and we carry the evidence of it with us throughout.

We tend to hide our scars, not realizing they make us who we are. Our scars are a testament to all that God has delivered us from, and they are not something to be ashamed or embarrassed of but rather something to showcase as evidence of His unwavering faithfulness.

Every scar I have directly correlates to an event in my life, whether for good or ill, depending on how I look at it, and each one is a constant reminder that though it wasn’t easy, God got me through it when everyone looking from the outside in had written me off already. This goes for spiritual scars as well as physical ones. Life is a tapestry of joy and pain, victories and defeats, times of plenty and times of famine, and each thread makes up a whole, a complete picture that, looking back on, one can clearly see the hand and providence of God throughout.

When you’re in the middle of the ocean, bobbing along on the waves, doing everything you can just to keep your head above water, it’s difficult to be introspective. You’re in survival mode, and everything you do is solely focused on staying alive. Eventually, after the lifeboat arrives and throws you a life preserver after you’re dragged on board, have a moment to catch your breath and know that you are safe, you get a chance to reflect and consider how much worse it could have been had the lifeboat not arrived when it did.

It’s only in our day and age that people turn around and sue individuals who save them from drowning or burning, citing that they were too rough in their efforts, but any rightly thinking, reasonable, logical individual would only show gratitude for having been saved, even if they got a bruise on their hip from being dragged into a boat, or out of a burning building.

Whenever God delivers you from a situation or a predicament you know full well you could have never delivered yourself from, the only attitude you should have is one of gratitude and thankfulness for His intervention. When I know that of my own accord, through my own strength, and by my own wisdom, I could not have navigated a situation satisfactorily, yet God intervened and made a way when there seemed to be none, anything less than me falling to my knees and thanking Him for His intervention is unseemly and less than He deserves. Gratitude is not just a feeling; it’s a way of acknowledging the divine intervention in our lives.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job LX

 Tomorrow, my youngest is turning seven. It puts a lot into perspective. It’s not that you don’t notice you’re getting older if you don’t have children. There will always be the odd gray hair or the rickety back to let you know you’re getting on in years, but when you have children, it’s a direct and constant reminder of the passing of time. Tempus Fugit, indeed, like it was doing industrial strength speed and washing it down with a six-pack of Red Bull.

The more they grow, the older you get because nothing stops time except for a dirt nap, and in that case, time stops only for the one in the ground. It goes on for everyone else.

It’s odd that while generally speaking, life is a short and fleeting thing, there are moments in life that seem to transpire in slow motion, wherein an hour feels like a day and a day feels like a year. It’s never when we’re laughing, smiling, enjoying the sun on our faces and the breeze in our hair, or in my case, my shaven scalp. Those days seem to zip by, and you look back on that five-day trip four days in and realize that it’s almost over, done with, and you’ll have to get back on that plane, likely with the same people, because most of them bought the same five-day package, and return to packing lunches, school drop off lines, dentist appointments, violin and cello practice, working your first job, then your second job, wondering if you could fit in a third job but just part-time because you want the kids to remember who you are and not call the police when you wander into the house exhausted.

The coo-coo clock doesn’t go any faster or any slower; it keeps perfect time, yet depending on what we’re going through at the time, you wonder where the time went or can’t believe it’s only been three minutes since the last time you looked at your watch. Yes, I know most people don’t have watches anymore, except for those thrall collars that tell them they need to walk three thousand more steps, go to the bathroom, drink more water, and breathe; that last one’s important. Don’t forget to breathe.

How did we manage before we were so laden with gadgets that we emanate low-frequency radiation even when we’re not around them? Don’t get me wrong, I like the convenience of not having to trek to an outhouse in the middle of the night or empty a chamber pot every morning, but what was meant to be a convenience has now become an obsession, an addiction, a prison cell without bars, to the point that if we wind up in an area without bars for more than thirty seconds, we start to sweat, and think it’s the end of the world. You’re three minutes from home, and you’ve driven the same road a thousand times, you’ll be okay. When what was sold as a tool to make your life easier turns into an albatross around your neck, without which you don’t feel normal or at ease, you are no longer mastering the tool; the tool is mastering you.

Job had none of the distractions we’ve become accustomed to. He was alone with his grief, with his pain, with the ever-present reality of his loss, and it’s very likely the days dragged on at a snail’s pace for him. It’s unlikely that time flies by when all you have is a potsherd with which to scratch at yourself and a heap of ashes upon which to lay your head.

Even when his friends showed up, they could do nothing more than sit with him in silence, seeing that his grief was very great. How do you console a man who was on top of the world one day, then the next, all he has left is the pain with which he has to contend?

There’s pain, then there’s pain. Physical pain is one thing; the pain of the heart is something wholly different. If your joints ache on a given morning, you can pop a couple of aspirin or lather yourself in icy hot and make it through the day, but when your heart is broken and shattered, there is no remedy for it but God.

Men try to find other ways to mute or numb the pain of the heart, as they have since the beginning of time, whether giving themselves over to wine, crawling into a bottle, taking pills and powders that are likelier to kill them than make them feel better because that soul-crushing pain of the heart is so unbearable as to make any physical pain pale in comparison.

For many, just having one of the things that happened to Job happen to them would be enough to throw them into an endless spiral of self-destruction, never mind loss upon loss, grief upon grief, and pain upon pain.

Job was within his rights to lament. He was within his rights to grieve and pour out what he’d been holding in for so many days.

Oftentimes, we have unrealistic expectations of those whom God has called to service. We expect them to be superhuman, beyond feeling or emotion, always rising above the circumstances of their existence, and when they do show emotion, when they mourn, and weep, and cry out, we think less of them.  

God never called anyone to be unfeeling, emotionless, or robotic; He called them to be obedient. Rather than look down on a brother who is grieving a loss while continuing to walk in obedience, we should encourage them, be there for them, and comfort them because even in their pain, they’re doing what God called them to do.

My grandfather took my grandmother’s passing hard. She’d been the love of his life, and when she died, a piece of him died with her. While still in mourning, even before we had the wake, a lady from Kansas came to visit because she’d heard about the ministry and she was in the area. We honored her request and gave her our apartment address; even in the midst of all the tumult, my grandfather and I made time for her, and we spent a good thirty minutes talking; we said a prayer, and she left. We thought nothing of it, busy making the arrangements to ship my grandmother back to Romania, which in itself required jumping through so many hoops you’d think you were in the circus. A month or so later, we got a letter in the mail from the aforementioned lady informing us that she was underwhelmed by the experience, didn’t feel welcome when she visited, and that we could have been more hospitable.

If she hadn’t known of the situation and that my grandmother was lying in a casket at a funeral home, I would have seen my way to being more gracious in my response, but she did; it was the first thing I informed her of when she walked into our apartment.

I understand that this may come as a shock to some, but it’s not always about you. The world doesn’t revolve around your happiness, and sometimes, the people you interact with who seem distant or distracted are going through their own version of hell and doing their best to just keep it together.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LIX

 Job 3:1-3, “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job spoke, and said: “May the day perish on which I was born, and the night in which it was said, ‘a male child is conceived.’ May that day be darkness; May God above not seek it, nor the light shine upon it. May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; may a cloud settle on it; may the blackness of the day terrify it.”

Although we do not know how much time passed between Job’s friends hearing of his travails and making their way to him, it was likely more than a couple of days. Considering that news of his hardship had to travel to them first, then they had to get together and decide to go to him, and then the journey itself, it was not something quick or instantaneous.

Once again, historical context matters. There were no phones, no e-mail, no air travel, no rail, no cars, and the three friends likely rode camels to come and see Job. It all took time, and enough time had passed that when they saw him, Job was unrecognizable.

I was in the United States when my mother went to her reward. She was hosting a group of friends in Romania and was in the process of making breakfast for them when her race was done, and she crossed the finish line. Within minutes, I got the call, and an hour later, I was on my way to the airport. Within twenty-four hours, I was on a different continent, and after an eight-hour drive from the airport, I was in Botosani. Although we take such conveniences for granted and rarely consider how easy traveling halfway across the world has become in our modern age, even fifty miles back in the day would have taken considerable time to traverse.

Throughout all this the only conversation we are privy to, the only words it is documented that Job uttered was the interaction with his wife. It wasn’t drawn out or protracted; it was just a handful of words followed by silence. A man alone with his grief, a man alone with his pain. Even after his friends arrived, there were another seven days of silence wherein they just sat on the ground with him, no one speaking to him or having a conversation.

Throughout all this time, the pressure was building. Just because he hadn’t said anything, it doesn’t mean Job had nothing to say. Silence doesn’t always translate to everything being okay. After almost twenty-five years of marriage, I can tell when my wife’s mood is off, even if no words are spoken. If you’re a married man, you know the insidiousness of the silent treatment, and if you are wise, you will brace yourself for the inevitable blow-off top pressure release.

During the first few years, whenever that sense that something wasn’t right would tickle the back of my neck, I’d just ignore it, only to have it spill over a few days later. Being older and wiser nowadays, the instant I feel something is off, I start the conversation because I know if I allow it to fester and don’t deal with it when it finally comes to a head, it will be far more dramatic than it would have earlier on.

It’s usually a small thing, something that hadn’t even registered, but something that stuck in her craw, and once we talk about it and discuss it like rational adults, it becomes a nonissue. Unless there is infidelity involved, marriages don’t crumble and fall apart overnight. Avoiding necessary conversations might delay uncomfortable situations, but it will not make them go away. The longer you wait, the longer you put it off, the more you ignore that sense of unease wafting off your wife or husband like steam off a hot kettle in the middle of winter, it will be all the worse when you finally deal with it. It doesn’t even have to be something big or a major issue, but a lot of small things that build up over time, and eventually, there’s always the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back, and the floodgates give way to hours of back and forth when it could have been dealt with in five minutes flat at the moment of inception.

Shortly after we got married, we were on our honeymoon, and I decided to splurge and rent a convertible for the few days we were away. I still remember it. It was a canary yellow Camaro, and since it was summer, the moment I got behind the wheel, I put the top down. A day or two into our trip, my wife asked if she could drive, and I said no, not because I don’t trust her driving, but because my name was the only one on the rental agreement, and if anything happened, insurance would not cover it.

I didn’t take the time to explain this; I just said no, and we went on with our day. I felt something was off, but didn’t know what, so I just ignored it. Six months later, as we were sitting down for dinner, out of nowhere, my wife asked, “Why didn’t you let me drive the car?” It had been six months. I had no clue what she was talking about or what she was referring to, but it was something that she’d held onto all this time.

I asked what car, which made it worse because I should have known exactly what she was referring to in her estimation. When she reminded me of our honeymoon, I informed her that her name was not on the rental agreement and so wasn’t covered by insurance, to which she replied, “Oh,” and that was the end of the conversation.

Job had spent a considerable amount of time in silence, even after his friends arrived, but this did not mean that he was not vexed or that his pain had lessened. After sitting in silence for seven days with his friends, and Lord knows how many days before that, Job finally spoke, and he had a lot to say. The lesson here is clear: don’t let issues fester in your relationships. Address them in a timely manner before they escalate and become more difficult to resolve. Once Job got started, if not for the dark undertones, his monologue could be seen as poetic. Everything he’d been thinking in silence came out in a rush, and for an entire chapter, he unburdens himself of all the pent-up emotions. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.