The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me

No, nothing terrible has happened to me. Just documenting a sync.

I started the Book of Job today, and this verse struck me as particularly poetic:

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me (Job 3:25).

I spent a few minutes thinking about why this verse -- a simple thought expressed in simple language, repeated twice (hmm, a bit like "and miles to go before I sleep") -- should be so powerful. I made a note to think about it some more.

Later, I checked Synlogos and clicked the link for a post called "Of Slugs and Saints" just because the title seemed potentially interesting. It's an announcement that the blogger, Paul Kingsnorth, is taking a break from blogging because he's ill. Much of the post deals with the proper spiritual response to illness and thus syncs in a very general way with the Book of Job. (It was only after Job's bodily heath was affected that he made the statement quoted above.)

For some reason, I became curious about who Paul Kingsnorth is. The post didn't make any great impression on me or anything, and I had no plans to read anything else he wrote; it was just a bit of random curiosity. His Wikipedia page has a link to a "The Cross and the Machine," a 2021 essay he wrote for First Things describing his then-recent conversion to Christianity, so I clicked for that. Again, the writing didn't particularly grab me, so I just skimmed a bit. In the middle, I found this pull quote:

It's the same verse from Job that had caught my attention earlier today. Even the same translation. The strange thing is that that verse doesn't appear in the essay at all. Ctrl-Fing shows no hits, outside of the pull quote itself, for either fear or afraid. If it's meant to be an epigraph, confusingly displayed in the style of a pull quote, you'd think it tell you where the quotation came from. Anyway, a bit of a coincidence.