8 “Look, I go forward, but He is not there,
And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;
⁹ When He works on the left hand, I cannot behold Him;
When He turns to the right hand, I cannot see Him.

¹⁰ But He knows the way that I take;
When He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold. (Job 23:8-10 NKJV)

I added the break in between verse 9 and 10 for emphasis. We can take scripture and read them in isolation, like verse 8 & 9 and convince ourselves that God is just not there sometimes, like He seemed to be absent when Job was going through his trials. But we need to take in all of scripture and continue to verse 10 where we see that God knows our ways and sometimes test us to bring forth gold.

This life can feel like the refiners furnace at times. We can find ourselves seemingly drowning in issues and concerns. It may not be that God is absent, but that He is trying to get our attention. Or that we have some bigger picture to play out that God is allowing difficulty to make come to pass. We just cannot always know. But like our scripture, we cannot take our life in small snippets. We need to see it as a whole and often that cannot happen until we reach the other side.

Reflect on: How you are perceiving your life right now. Are you looking at it in the fullness of time or simply in the small section of time you are living right now.