The mystery of suffering

Reading through the book of Job has been enriched by my having a friend who is currently suffering a heinous mess of a life largely thrust upon her by someone else's sin and the ineptitude (i.e., painstaking slowness/inaccessibility) of the court system. Job understood many things, things about the justice and righteousness of God and his claims upon him as a sinful man, even about resurrection in the last day, but it seems that suffering was not on his radar. Is this part of the mystery revealed in Christ, that suffering is a necessary part of the path to glory? Not to say that we embrace it any more willingly this side of the cross. I am most challenged by the ineptitude of Job's three friends who seek to comfort Job, but end up only condemning him. Indeed I feel uncertain if there is any way to comfort a person who is acutely suffering. I say that not to get myself off the hook, for God knows that I continue to try, but when there is so little I can do to alleviate the suffering, encouraging someone to wait patiently for the LORD to act, to keep their view on His final justice, where justice will be done and will be seen to be done, seems so inadequate. There is this interesting character of Elihu, a younger man, who weighs in late in the story, a prelude to the LORD's own appearance, who expresses his disappointment with the level of discourse he has heard from the four men. I don't quite know what to make of him, but feel his drawing attention to the unknowableness of God and our posture of humility in His presence, even when it looks like absence, is a good word. I'm really glad this story, with all its conundrums, is in the scriptures.