'Bored to death by his comforters and scratching his boils and facing the undertaker's unpaid bill for the multiple funeral of his children and the entire household staff, how could Job possibly forsee that his bloodshot eyes would indeed behold, and by no means as a stranger, the one who laid the foundations of the earth and at whose work the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who could have predicted that God would choose not Esau, the honest and reliable, but Jacob, the trickster and heel, that he would put the finger on Noah, who hit the bottle, or on Moses, who was trying to beat the rap in Midian for braining a man in Eygpt and said if it weren't for the honor of the thing he'd just as soon let Aaron go back and face the music, or the prophets, who were a ragged lot, mad as hatters most of them and dragging their heels to a man when they were called to hit the sawdust trail? Who can have foretold that out of the sordid affair between David and Uriah's wife, Bathsheba, Solomon would be born with his high IQ and his passion for ecclesiastical architecture and that out of Solomon would be born a whole line of apostate kings ending finally in a king the likes of whom nobody could possibly have foretold except maybe Second Isaiah, who saw at least that it wasn't his beaux yeux that would draw men to him or by the power of his heavy artillery that he would king it over them.'
Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.57.
