The Theology of Staying on the Call

We were sitting on FaceTime. Two thousand miles apart. A year into a long-distance relationship. Bibles open. Laptops open. Commentaries pulled up on the screen. And Larissa — my wife, my girlfriend at the time — was in the middle of it.

She’d lost her job and lost someone she loved. Sitting in that place where grief and uncertainty blur together, and you can’t tell which one is heavier because they take turns. She felt directionless — not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind where people ask how you’re doing, and you say “good” because explaining it would take longer than they actually want to listen.

That’s where we were when we opened the Book of Job.

I need to be honest — I didn’t go to Job because I had some deep theological itch to scratch. I went because I was two thousand miles away from the woman I loved and I was running out of things to say. To her. To God. To myself. When you can’t take something from someone — when you can’t even be in the same room — you start reaching for anything that might hold weight.

The Bible app told me it was 42 chapters. Forty-two felt manageable. We’d done longer studies. We’d done worse weeks.

Here’s what I always thought I knew about Job: good man, lost everything, stayed faithful, got it all back. Patience. Endurance. The Sunday school version. Neat. Clean. Wrapped up with a bow.

The actual text is nothing like that.

Job screams. He curses the day he was born. He demands that God show up and explain Himself. He says things that, if I said them in church, somebody’s grandmother would grab my arm.

Read Job 3 sometime. The whole chapter is him wishing he’d been stillborn. We don’t talk about that one in Sunday school.

And God never rebukes him for it. Not once.

You know who God rebukes? The friends. The ones with the theology. The ones who sat down, opened their mouths, and spent thirty chapters explaining why Job must have done something to deserve this.

The raw, messy, angry, grieving one — he’s the one God calls righteous. I sat with that for a while. Larissa sat with it longer.

In the first two chapters, there’s a scene in heaven. God and Satan are having a conversation about Job. Satan says, essentially: He only loves You because You bless him. Take it away. He’ll curse You to Your face.

God allows it. Job loses everything. His children. His wealth. His health. His dignity.

And here’s the thing — Job never finds out about that conversation. Not in chapter 3. Not in chapter 20. Not in chapter 42. Not ever.

He goes through the entire book — every argument with his friends, every plea to God, every sleepless night — without the one piece of information that would have made it all make sense. And God never gives it to him.

When I read that out loud over FaceTime, she went quiet for a long time. Two thousand miles of silence on the line. She didn’t have to say anything.

Here’s what I didn’t realize we had absorbed — not from bad theology, just from existing in church culture long enough: the quiet assumption that suffering means something went wrong. If you’re in pain, there’s a reason you can locate. A sin you haven’t confessed. A lesson you’re supposed to be learning. A door that closed because a better one is opening.

Every Christian I know has been handed at least three of those at a funeral. Sometimes by people who meant well. Sometimes by people who couldn’t stand the silence and needed something — anything — to put in the room.

Job’s friends believed the same thing. Eliphaz. Bildad. Zophar. Three men who loved Job enough to sit in the dirt with him for seven days — and then loved their theology more than they loved their friend.

It undid the guilt. The quiet, corrosive guilt that whispers maybe if I had done something differently, maybe if I had been more faithful, maybe I’m being punished for something I can’t even name. Larissa was carrying that. I didn’t fully realize it until Job gave us the language to name it — and then dismantle it.

In chapter 38, God finally speaks. From a whirlwind. And I expected — maybe we both expected — the answer. The explanation. The reason.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, God asks Job about the foundations of the earth. About the storehouses of snow. About whether Job can command the morning or tell the sea where to stop. About mountain goats and ostriches and the wild ox.

I remember reading those chapters out loud and thinking, this is the worst pastoral counsel I have ever heard.

Then I read them again.

It sounds like a dodge. It’s not. God is saying: You cannot comprehend the complexity of a single weather system — and you want Me to hand you the whole moral universe in a sentence?

It’s not cruelty. It’s scale.

Job went from secondhand theology to a firsthand encounter. He didn’t get an explanation. He got God. And somehow — impossibly, frustratingly, beautifully — that was enough.

Job’s friends are the cautionary tale. Not because they showed up — they showed up. They traveled. They wept. They tore their robes. They sat on the ground for seven days without saying a word.

That was the best thing they ever did. It was when they started talking that everything fell apart. When they started explaining. When they decided they knew why Job was hurting and what he needed to do about it.

Twenty-eight chapters of advice. To a man whose children had just been buried. Imagine being the friend who shows up at the wake and brings a slide deck.

I had to ask myself: how many times had I done that? Long-distance forces you to confront it. You can’t hug someone through a screen. You can’t cook for them. You can’t sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the porch and let the quiet do the work. All you have is your words.

We stopped asking why is this happening and started asking who is God in the middle of this. That shift is everything. It’s the shift Job makes. It’s the shift the whole book is trying to produce in the reader.

We’ve been married six years now. That FaceTime call was a long time ago. But I still think about it — the two of us, screens glowing, Bibles open, trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense.

That’s actually what Job is about. Not having the answer. Just staying in the room. Staying on the call.