I got notes from three different people last week. All are going through troubled times and all asked me a variation on the same question: “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?”

I’m afraid I did a very poor job of answering them. Aside from the standard platitudes–you have done nothing to deserve this, God never tests us beyond our strength, we generally emerge from such trials better and stronger than we were–there are really no satisfactory answers to the “Why me?” question when we are in the middle of the battle. They all sound empty in that moment even if they prove true in the long term. And they don’t always prove true.

Another answer to the question seems alarmingly cruel: “Why not you?” The answer assumes there are diseases and injuries that are going to happen to people on a largely random basis, so periodically we are all going to get hit, either directly or indirectly, by misfortune. None of us is special–certainly not so special that bad things will detour around us to hit only those who “deserve” to have bad things happen to them.

But that answer seems far less cruel than what happens to Job in the Old Testament. Job is a happily married man with seven sons and seven daughters and a beautiful farm filled with sheep and cattle and oxen. He is a man of deep faith whose first act every morning is to praise God–and whose last act every night is to thank God for his good fortune in that day. God turns this good man over to Satan to be tested in a sort of wager.

Satan kills his sons and daughters, burns his house and barns to the ground, blights all the crops in the fields, and slaughters his animals. Sitting in the ruins of his burned out farm Job is forced to listen to his neighbors rant about the evil he must have done to so bring God’s wrath down on him. Finally, when Job is about to crack, God intervenes, explains this was all a test, and that Job shall live joyous days. He gets his house rebuilt, his crops replanted–his wife even has more children to replace the ones he has lost.

Maybe Job does live joyous days. But it seems to me that joy must be more than somewhat blighted by the memories of his 14 dead children–lost because God had to prove to Satan that Job was a good man. I hope Satan got the point–it was an expensive lesson Job picked up the tab for.

The night before Jane’s heart surgery, I randomly opened the Bible in my hotel room seeking some bit of wisdom for the days ahead. The book fell open to Job.  I hoped it meant that while we would face difficult times, in the end she would come back to me and we would live joyous days together.

Clearly I was wrong. Now, whatever happiness comes to me in the future, it will be tempered by this loss.

But tempering something also strengthens it. I take solace in that thought.