QUOTE : When my personal world is falling apart and something or someone precious is at stake, it is frightening when God doesn't show up to hold things together, especially when I'm begging him to come....Christians are great pretenders. We tell ourselves it's not supposed to be this way for Christians, and so we resort to a cover-up....God won't and doesn't participate in this kind of masquerade. ....On every page of the Bible there is recognition that faith encounters troubles. We are broken ourselves and can't escape the brokenness and loss of our fallen world. ....An honest reading [of Job and Naomi's stories] reveals a God who doesn't explain himself. He didn't tell Job about his earlier conversation with Satan and he didn't give Naomi three good reasons why her world fell apart. Both sufferers went to their graves with their whys unanswered and the ache of their losses still intact. But somehow, because they met God in their pain, both also gained a deeper kind of trust in him that weathers adversity and refuses to let go of God. Their stories coax us to get down to the business of wrestling with God instead of chasing rainbows and to employ the same kind of brutal honesty that they did, if we dare.