Real? Really?

I don't know how real this is consistently managing to be, but I'll consider this post to be my reality check. Here's just a little nugget of reality:

I have gone a few days without spending meaningful time in the Word of God. I've read the next chapters in Job a couple of times, but I have just not had the motivation to really dwell on the meaning therein. Maybe it's Satan trying to stop me. Maybe it's just me being me. Honestly, I've come to the conclusion I don't really care what the cause is. I just know what the effect has been . . . and that's a lesser me than what I should, could, and would have been had I given God anything close to His due attention. So . . . this is my attempt.

Job, chapters 29 and 30. This is a really sad pair of chapters, because chapter 29 is a reminiscence about the way life used to be for Job. The long and short of it is, Job was a stud. Job was the man. Job was everything Sinatra said he wanted to find himself to be when he woke up in that city that never sleeps. The higher ups all loved him. The down-and-outs loved him, too. He was the Ferris Bueller of his time, and they all thought he was a righteous dude. And he was. His only mistake was thinking it would always be that way.

Because chapter 30 is Job's lament of his current state: he was the fermented dung buried beneath the muck, lying below the dirt in which was rooted the grass that was flattened under the very bottom of the totem pole. Reading the two chapters in succession just leaves me very, very sad.

But I guess if there is a light shining through the gloom of Job's dichotomous experience, maybe it's the simple fact that in God's eyes, His relationship with Job didn't change when everything else in Job's life did. Even when Job wasn't feeling a single warm fuzzy toward God, God loved him eternally. 

I've never really seen my life turned upside down before. It's usually swelling and ebbing tidal shifts of emotion and varying levels of satisfaction. But I do know that I need God at every moment. I wish I would act like it more often. It heartens me to know that He is a constant despite my inconsistencies. It also makes me feel ashamed at the same time.

Oh, how I need Him.