The two booklets entitled "Who in the World Can You Trust?" total about 100 pages and are designed for study groups on the issue of trust. Actually, as the Leader's Guide states, "The study you are holding is designed for seekers--people who may never have studied the Bible before or who may have chosen not to include church in their lives at all (p.5)." This statement tips our hand as to the purpose of the work: to engage people at the level of the human reaction to loss and hope before necessarily probing the implications of grief and loss for Christian faith. It was this approach that would increasingly determine my work on the Book of Job: to examine it in a humanistic context as an exploration of the toll that loss takes on us as humans and how we might learn to rebuild hope once it has been shattered.

Glandion and I were approached by a representative of the Christian Reformed Church (a conservative denomination of Dutch extraction) in 1995 while Glandion was pastoring a church in that denomination. He asked us to write a guide on the issue of trust, consisting of both a leader's and student's booklet. Since the subject was fresh on my mind, I used the format and the flow of Trusting God Again in formulating the themes of this study. Though the booklets were completed by 1995, they did not appear in print until 2002 and are, at last report, being used widely in that denomination.

The study consists of six sections. First, I explore what I call "Trusting and Living." This is the situation of Job in Job 1. He has a "pre-disaster" set of trust expectations. He lives with certain beliefs and commitments, certain things up on which he puts his hope. The purpose of the class was to explore what some of those values were and to use Job's experience to help us define what our "pre-loss" values are/were. One of the realities of great loss is that it completely shakes our core assumptions about life.

The second lesson is entitled "Trusting and Loss" and explores, with the aid of Job 2, the nature of the losses that rip into our lives. We urged participants in the group to begin in a non-threatening way by discussing the scars they have on their bodies and where they got them. Almost everyone remembers how they got their bodily scars or, if they don't remember, they know the story from someone else's recollection. The purpose of the lesson is to help people investigate how we explain loss to ourselves when it comes into our lives.

In lesson three, entitled "Deep Thinking about Trust and Loss," we had the participants read Job 3 and study Job's (and their own) emotions as a result of great loss. Especially important for us in this lesson was a discussion of how loss can and does affect our ability to trust others and God. In a nutshell, loss endangers trust.

Lesson Four probes the difficult issue of friends and loss. It is difficult because great loss almost always puts up some kind of barrier between the person who loses and former friends. They simply cannot relate to each other in the same way as previously. In many cases the old friends fade away and new ones may appear. A more recent story from my own life, not in the booklets, is of a friend in the university administration who faces significant physical debilities because of a nerve disease. Though everyone knows him and he knows everyone on campus, only one or two people have been able to speak with him in a candid and helpful way about the reality he faces with his physical limitations. Job, too, found that understanding friends were few and far between in the middle of his distress.

Lesson Five, entitled "Remaking Trust," studies the process of reestablishing a renewed trust connection once trust has been frayed or destroyed. Using Job's famous text from 19:23-27 ("I know that my Redeemer Lives"--Job 19:25), I explore the transition from hopelessness to faith. I frame the issue in terms of the lessons that pain imparts to our life. For Job it led him to posit the existence of a Redeemer of his life. What lessons has pain taught you?

The booklet concludes with a chapter on "Developing the Habit of Trust," with insights gleaned from Job 42. The questions I pose for group study are: (1) What does Job mean when he says, "I know that you can do all things (42:2)?" In what tone of voice do you hear Job saying this? (2) What might Job mean when he says, "My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you (42:5)?" (3) God says to Eliphaz, "I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has (42:7)." What do you think God means by this statement? (4) What does God tell Job and his friends to do for each other in verses 8-9? What is happening here? And, finally, Job's possessions and family are finally restored. What words would you use to describe Job's life in the last few verses of the passage?

I was glad to be able to write two booklets designed for study by people who want to look at the reality of their feelings about life and pain by using the Book of Job as a guide. I think the Book of Job is a wonderful resource for people of lots of or little faith as it challenges all of us to hear and appropriate the lessons that pain tries to teach us.

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