3/8/2025

Elihu Tells Us It’s Raining

I don’t exactly know when my life became so religious. Suddenly all I can write are homilies and prayers. It’s strange, but honestly I’m just thrilled to be writing.

Anyway, the queer bible study group I go to finally finished our discussion of the book of Job. After weeks of sitting with this man and his friends, weeks of listening to those friends bombard Job with their rationalizations and impassioned defenses and accusations about deserving, we finally reached the end. This had been my first close reading of Job, and I was stunned by how relatable it was.

When I first joined the group, it was last year in the aftermath of the hurricane that ravaged North Carolina. Now, as we conclude the story of the troubled man of Scripture, the world feels as set against trans people as it did against Job. It feels like those early chapters, wherein every verse is more bad news. His cattle, his children, his house, his health. My rights. My access to healthcare. My dignity.

When his friends saw Job, they tear their clothes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then, they sat with Job in the ruins of his house and took turns interrogating the harried, grief-stricken man, searching for any inferiority or cause for his suffering. This is the lion’s share of the book: Job’s friends performing their grief and searching for ways to make this his fault.

Yesterday, my state passed a slew of anti-trans legislation, some of which had Democrat support. One of these senators shook my hands two years ago and told me they would always be here for the trans people of Georgia. When it came time to support the most vulnerable among us, she wrung her hands and chose politics over her supposed “morals.” Watching her defend herself, defend her decision to abandon her principles, I felt like Job. I watched my “friend” say everything but what I needed to hear. I watched my “friend” try to justify why the engines of trans marginalization would run unopposed.

Eventually, after hours of Job’s three friends’ moralizing, the youngest of their number finally spoke up.

How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out.
He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams;
the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.
Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion?
See how he scatters his lightning about him, bathing the depths of the sea.
This is the way he governs the nations and provides food in abundance.
He fills his hands with lightning and commands it to strike its mark.
His thunder announces the coming storm; even the cattle make known its approach.

When our group read that aloud on our uncomfortable polyblend couches of our church reading room, I was ready to chuck the book against the wall. Of course, God’s will is beyond Job’s understanding. Of course it is not his fault. It’s nature. It's the weather. The world, the cruel machinations of idiot men and bigots that pelts people, they are a new kind of weather. Suddenly every single one of Elihu’s rhetorical devices revolved around rain and storms. Every example. Every metaphor.

And then, finally, Elihu went quiet and God finally spoke to Job:

Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm.

Then it hit me. Then it crashed into me right out of the sky like a hailstone from the heavens. It’s raining. It’s not “a storm appeared and the LORD spoke.” In the story of Job, in the ruins of his broken house, surrounded by well-wishers and head-scratching moralizers, it’s raining. Elihu is pointing at storm above them. His message is not one of deference or humility, it’s about the futility of trying to reason with weather when it’s raining.

You have to get out of the fucking rain.

As anti-trans legislation and rhetoric reach a fever pitch, I see so much discussion of how wrong it is. When the executive order defined female as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” and a million well-intentioned liberals snarked about how we’re all technically female at conception, I felt it raining. When people bring up the hypocrisy of Republicans’ fetishizing of parental choice for school vouchers and not health care for their trans children, I felt it raining. Finally, through Job, through Elihu, I had something to do.

No matter what rhetoric or justification they come up with, it’s just weather. I will no longer argue with the weather. The storm of fascism and idiocy will undo itself against the earth. Their rain will end. Until then I will be focused on shelter for my people. I will be focused on keeping the trans people I know happy and safe.

Job’s mistake, Elihu points out, was wasting time trying to understand God during a thunderstorm. It’s a mistake you can’t afford to make covered in boils and the ashes of your home. It’s a mistake I’m tired of making.

So when Elihu tells us it is raining, I’m tired of sitting around with those who would seek to explain it away. I’m tired of people who have answers but no umbrellas.

I will not entertain “discussion” until my people are dry.