Job 42:10 Meaning Yahweh Turned the Captivity of Job

Job's fortune turns at the moment he stops pleading for himself and holds his friends in a better light. Praying for them means seeing them well, imagining them whole, wishing them the good he wanted for himself. The instant he does this, his own bondage breaks. The captivity was never a fact of the world. The captivity was a state he had been living from.

What a person imagines for others, he sets loose in his own world, because there is one imagination and every man draws from it. Grant good to another and the same measure returns, doubled, since the giving and the having are one act. Job's release and his reward arrive together. A man is freed by the kindness he first grants in his mind to someone else.

The fastest way out of a man's own suffering is the trouble of someone who has not earned his kindness.

Held long enough, a loss hardens into a belief that a debt is owed, and that belief sets the state a man lives in. The state gives grievance, grievance keeps score, and years of score-keeping compound into a life lived at the spot where it broke. Nothing there grows, and what is not growing is dying.

Praying for the men who wounded him required wanting a future for them, and that cannot be produced from inside a ledger. Bitterness gives way to compassion, compassion acts the way a giver acts, and Yahweh could then double what open hands had room to hold. Clutching an injury costs a person every good thing that arrives while both hands are full.