Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will leave this life. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. ~Job 1:21
It’s a quarter to six in the morning. Your alarm is set to go off in exactly fifteen minutes, but on this day it doesn’t matter. Why? Because today someone—apparently with an IQ equal to that of a carrot—rings your doorbell. Suddenly it’s as though the circus has come to your living room.
The dog is in a frenzy, barking and spinning at the front door. Your wife has bolted for her robe, the baby is wailing, and your heart is fully aerobic—from your sleeping rate of 57 beats per minute to 180 in a nanosecond. To say the least, you’re furious. “Who, in the name of good sense, could this be?” you sneer.
You unlock the front door and boldly open it, ready to let someone have it. The tidy man standing there is dressed in a navy suit, starched white shirt, thin red tie, and light khaki trench coat. His precise, narrow face and pasty complexion make clear to you that he has spent no time in the National Hockey League. “A bill collector,” you whisper to yourself.
“Good morning,” the man speaks in a quiet but confident voice. “I am sorry to have wakened you this early, but I have something to give you.” With that, he hands you a plain, white, business-size envelope. Without another word, he turns and walks away. You stand there for a moment looking at the envelope. Then you tear it open. Inside is a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. There’s nothing else inside—no note, no explanation, just the money.
You turn the Benjamin over a couple times to make sure it’s real. “It looks real,” you quietly mumble. You scratch your head and shuffle off to take a shower.
The next morning, at exactly 5:45, the doorbell rings and every detail of yesterday’s story is repeated. Incredibly, this goes on for a year—every morning, like clockwork— same guy, same face, another one hundred dollars. Every single day.
A few weeks into this experience you are clearly awake by a quarter to six, knowing the gift is on its way. In a few months, you are fully expecting the money to come. In fact, you have bought a car and told your banker that you “earn” an extra three thousand dollars a month! Can you imagine this kind of presumption?
At the end of a year, the man stops coming to your house. There’s no explanation; he just stops. Even though you neither knew him nor understood why the gifts were delivered, you lie there morning after morning wondering where he went. In fact, even though you knew nothing about the man or the reason for money, not having him come to your house made you a little angry.
Job had been the recipient of remarkable blessings. Day after day he opened his front door, and there they were. Then the gifts stopped coming. Not only that, but Job lost everything—his oxen, his donkeys, his servants, his sheep, his camels, and most tragically, his family. But Job knew that everything he “owned” was a gift in the first place. These things did not come to him as a result of his worthiness. They all came to him as unearned allowance. And now they were gone. For Job, with no explanation, the early morning doorbell stopped ringing.
So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He mourned, and then he praised the name of the Lord. What a story.