Job 3:16

Or why was I not buried like a stillborn,

                Like Infants who never see daylight.

This is not the most famous 3:16 in the Bible. Our pastor had an idea last year to do a sermon on every 20:20. I do not know how many 20:20s there are, but I have none memorized. My campus pastor said I need to do Ecclesiastes after Job. Maybe its 3:16 is better than this one.

The ideas around a stillborn include being hidden, miscarriage, and abortion. Reproduction is dangerous. Through out time, mothers have died during pregnancy or while giving birth or even afterwards from the complications. Many children have been miscarried due to any host of reasons. These are natural things, in religious aspects a complication of sin, but not unlike what happens in the animal kingdom all around us. It is not something anyone likes to talk about, but it is reality.  Job not only speaks about it but wishes it could have been him. Many people try to hide their history of problems in this area, and he seems to be referring to the common outcome.

Abortion is a topic with over 8 billion sides to it. I like to only think of it as a medical procedure to save a mother’s life, but I am not directly impacted by the other aspects, and my opinion means little to most everyone. My view on this topic is not a significant part of who I am or how I behave. The book I am currently reading talks about a situation where every issue is destabilizing. Many, many of the big issues people fight over mean almost nothing to the outcome of the universe in this story, or even the root issue they want to resolve. Abortion in general will not change our world at large, but it does have huge impacts on each individual involved.

Somehow I think I am missing a lesson in this verse, but the topic is just too raw to see past.