That first reading is a tough one.
And that's because the Book of Job is not an entirely happy story. It's the story of a righteous man who is tested by God; it's about suffering and our response to it.
Job loses pretty much everything: his family, his home, his belongings. So it's natural that he has a bleak outlook on life. He sees life as a drudgery, he's just killing time, feeling restless and miserable; and thinking that this is the way it's always going to be.
That's a very sad image, but it's one that's probably familiar to us. If we haven't experienced it ourselves, we probably all know someone who's found their life to be meaningless. They don't know what they're doing or where their going.
The world is a broken place, there's no denying that.
The question that arises for us as Christians, as people who say we believe in a loving God, is where is He? Where is God in the midst of all of this.
We see God's answer in the Gospel today.
This year, we've been hearing from the Gospel of Mark. It's the shortest of the four gospels, but, in a way, it's also the most dramatic. In Mark's telling of the story, Jesus seems to be constantly running from one place to another, he's always on the move - curing the sick, casting out demons and proclaiming the gospel.
In today's reading, Jesus encounters people with serious problems.
First, he goes with some of the disciples to the home of Simon's mother-in-law. She's sick in bed, but when Jesus helps her up, she's healed.
Then St. Mark says that the entire town gathered at the door to the house to see Jesus. They brought him sick people and people afflicted by demons ... and he heals them too. He casts out the demons, not even allowing them to speak.
Early the next day, after doing all these great works, healing people and freeing them from evil, Jesus goes off by himself to pray.
This should tell us something very important about Jesus, this man who we call our savior: his ministry of healing, his work of restoring people to health and freedom flows out of his relationship with the Father.
Like Job and the people Jesus encountered in the gospel, we all have suffering in our lives. We all have things that make us cry out to God, "Fix this! Take this problem away!"
But God does more than that - more than performing some sort of trick that creates some perfect world that we imagine - He sent His Son to be with us.
Jesus comes into the lives of all these people and makes them whole, he heals them, but his mission is not just physical healing. In many of the gospel stories, when someone asks for Jesus' help, he tells them to have faith or to believe.
His healing, is primarily a spiritual one - because we are spiritual beings. Our sufferings here on Earth are an opportunity to join ourselves with Christ who joined himself to us.
At the end of the gospel, when Simon says to Jesus, "Everyone is looking for you," he is absolutely right. Every single one of us is looking for an answer - we're looking for something that will make sense of our lives, whether we're unhappy and suffering or completely comfortable: we can't do this on our own.
So Christ comes to us. He's not a distant, angry god who we need to impress; and he's not some impersonal force than we can reach if we just concentrate enough. He is a person.
A person who came and healed sick people. Who felt compassion for those who were suffering.
He's that same person for us.
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