On page 92 of his book, Stars Beneath Us, Paul Wallace writes about learning something he already knew—a second learning, as it were. I experienced that as I was reading his book: Wallace articulates—and does it well—something I had only been able to intuit.

Of course, Paul Wallace has an advantage; he’s far better educated, holding a PhD in experimental nuclear physics and a Masters of Divinity.  He’s both a scientist and a cleric, a combination that gives him a particular, if not unique, view of the world that God made.

And it’s a view that might upset a lot of people who call themselves religious, but insist on creating God in their own image.

I can sympathize with this. About twenty-five years ago, I was teaching a college age Sunday School class and was cautioning them against the popular image of a “vending machine God:” deposit a prayer and watch an answer fall into the tray below. One of my favorite class members (because he had a smart mouth that didn’t seem to have a switch on it) asked, “Then why do you worship God?”

My answer was quick and probably without the benefit of ratiocination: “Because God is God, and I’m not.”

Quick and thoughtless as it may have been I’ve held to that concept ever since. I worship a God so great and powerful that if he chooses to ignore me, I still cannot not ignore Him (or insert the politically correct pronoun of your choice).

And that’s the reason that Job is probably my favorite book in the Bible, the same reason that it forms the spine of Stars Beneath Us. Job, at least for most of the book, upends the traditional worship-reward model of Man-God relationship.

It’s not that I like reading about the suffering Job: loss, death, and boils. I do always get a chuckle at the first interchange between God and Satan. In my head, they sound like a couple of home boys:

                GOD: Yo, Satan, where you been?

                SATAN: Just roamin’ to and fro across the Earth.

Then comes what might be the most incomprehensible sentence in the entire Bible: Hast thou considered my servant Job?

God, without reason or provocation, fingers Job, whom he calls “a perfect and upright man,” and sets in motion the destruction of Job’s very privileged world.

It’s great drama, which is probably the reason it’s been the basis for several plays, and we see a lot of humanity that we recognize, especially Job’s friends, who try to reconcile his troubles with their view of God.

But the part I like best is where Job challenges God, and God responds (very loose paraphrase): Sit down and shut up, Job. I’m God and you’re not. Then he takes Job on a tour of creation.

All of that I’ve known for years, but the new perspective that Paul Wallace gave me was that God showed Job a lot of his creation that he was very pleased with that was not human-centric. He seemed to be showing Job that humankind was a part of his creation, but not all of it. Perhaps not even the best of it. And it’s the realization that we’re simply creatures that gives us an idea of the majesty of God.

Wallace, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at Agnes Scott, devotes a chapter to the idea that in a cosmos as large as we know, there could be other life. He discusses the “six numbers” that have to be calibrated exactly for life to exist, numbers that make life on other planets extremely unlikely, but given the number of other planets, certainly not impossible. They would be God’s creation, too.

Several years ago, a Jewish friend of mine called and asked me if it would shake my faith if science discovered life on other planets. He had just received a lecture from a mutual acquaintance who had been converted to the Baptist denomination. I told him it would probably scare me, but it wouldn’t shake my faith since I believed that God was free, and if He wanted to create other life, that was His business.

I had gotten over the idea that what I was or what I did was reason for God to favor me. There was a time that I might have sat on the ash heap with Job, proclaiming my worthiness and claiming the unfairness of my position.

“I am straight. I am white. I teach Sunday School. I passed Dr. Agnes Stout’s Advanced Grammar class. I’m a good person, and I don’t deserve this.”

And God says, “You’re looking in all the wrong places.”

Wallace and I do have some things in common. He’s a member and Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church Decatur. Linda and I went there for a while. But the most striking commonality is that we both had the same experience a couple of decades apart.

Reverend Bill Self, pastor of Wieuca Road Baptist, had a formulaic ending to the Sunday Evening service. “It’s been a good day,” he would say, and then enumerate the reasons it had been a good day. Wallace, as a child, heard that and wondered, because on that “good day” he had witnessed a woman being struck and killed by a bus.

I remember sitting in church and having the same reaction. Earlier in the week I had spent several hours trying to help one of the kids in the class that I taught understand why his mother left the dinner table, walked into the bathroom, and shot herself in the head. He didn’t understand why. Neither did I.

We knew that, contrary to Bill’s pronouncement, days weren’t good for everybody. Some were downright terrible. But that didn’t change who God was, nor did it change our relationship to him.

I appreciate Paul Wallace’s writing this book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in being shaken from their sometimes thought-free acceptance of their relationship with God and Jesus. The book is available from Fortress Press (fortresspress.com).

I also appreciate his helping me revisit Job. It reminded me that I really do have the patience of Job, that is, almost none at all.