What's Left?

Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes. His wife said to him, "Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!" Job 2:8-9  

Job is an iconic man of suffering from the Bible. He was blessed with livestock, children, a large home, possessions, good health, and his wife. In one quick afternoon he lost all of it except for his loving wife. Even though I have tended to be a little harsh in my assessment of her, I need to remember that she had suffered great loss as well. She and Job were now at the point where everything that had once been important to them both was gone. Mrs. Job speaks out of frustration when she wonders why her husband is clinging to his integrity.

The thought occurred to me this morning: maybe he's hanging on to his integrity because it's all that he has left. Isn't that true for all of us though? We might surround ourselves with other things and even inflate our own ego with possessions, talent, and influence. If all of those things are stripped away however, there should be something that is stable and unchanging. When everything else is removed our character should still stand strong. It's in these desperate moments when we find out if our integrity has the value we think it does.

When all of our "stuff" is gone-who are we? If we can't answer that with confident authority we might need to start working on reshaping our character.