1: "I can't stand my life--I hate it! -I'm putting it all out on the table, all the bitterness of my life--I'm holding back nothing."
2: Job prayed: "Here's what I want to say: Don't, God, bring in a verdict of guilty without letting me know the charges you're bringing.
3: How does this fit into what you once called "good'--giving me a hard time, spurning me, a life you shaped by your very own hands, and then blessing the plots of the wicked?
4: You don't look at things the way we mortals do. You're not taken in by appearances, are you?
5: Unlike us, you're not working against a deadline. You have all eternity to work things out.
6: So what's this all about, anyway--this compulsion to dig up some dirt, to find some skeleton in my closet?
7: You know good and well I'm not guilty. You also know no one can help me.
8: "You made me like a handcrafted piece of pottery--and now are you going to smash me to pieces?
9: Don't you remember how beautifully you worked my clay? Will you reduce me now to a mud pie?
10: Oh, that marvel of conception as you stirred together semen and ovum--
11: What a miracle of skin and bone, muscle and brain!
12: You gave me life itself, and incredible love. You watched and guarded every breath I took.
13: "But you never told me about this part. I should have known that there was more to it--
14: That if I so much as missed a step, you'd notice and pounce, wouldn't let me get by with a thing.
15: If I'm truly guilty, I'm doomed. But if I'm innocent, it's no better--I'm still doomed. My belly is full of bitterness. I'm up to my ears in a swamp of affliction.
16: I try to make the best of it, try to brave it out, but you're too much for me, relentless, like a lion on the prowl.
17: You line up fresh witnesses against me. You compound your anger and pile on the grief and pain!
18: "So why did you have me born? I wish no one had ever laid eyes on me!
19: I wish I'd never lived--a stillborn, buried without ever having breathed.
20: Isn't it time to call it quits on my life? Can't you let up, and let me smile just once
21: Before I die and am buried, before I'm nailed into my coffin, sealed in the ground,
22: And banished for good to the land of the dead, blind in the final dark?" HKZophar's CounselHK How Wisdom Looks from the Inside