Sometimes, life is full of winds and storms. And yes, our first instinct is “*Woe is me! God please change my circumstances*”. Sometimes, God does change our circumstances. But how about when he doesn’t change them and instead doubles down like he did in the case of [[Job 2]]? What happens? What happens when life is filled with circumstances and situations that escalate with seemingly no cause? ### Accept it as the nature of life The first is to accept that this is the nature of life. The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes reflects on the sometimes unpredictable nature of life. ![[Eccles 1#2]] The phrase, [per this very helpful video from the Bible project](https://youtu.be/VeUiuSK81-0?si=LnZjcE3zYdF5Dhav), means to say life is like smoke, formless and hard to understand the true nature of. Like smoke, just when you think it has a specific shape, it changes and becomes something else. When you think you have it in your palm, it escapes and disappears. Job, when confronted with the pain of having lost everything in his life that was of value, accepted the pain that was forwarded to him. He continued to recognize that the good that he had received in his life was from God and thus, if taken away, he could not find it in himself to ’*curse God*’ per his wife’s suggestion.