Job was a fundamentally changed man after God restored his good fortunes twice over. That restoration was not a restoration of the old Job. After undergoing the loss of all his former blessings, Job became a man with no attachments. In the depths of his destitution, he had nothing more to lose — and after that trial, we should assume, Job became a man who would no longer be disturbed by loss of any kind. Thus, he remained fundamentally a man with nothing to lose even after God doubly restored his blessings.
The virtue of detachment is fostered above all in the trials brought on by loss or by the threat of loss, such that after such trials one has learned not to depend for one’s happiness on the possession of anything that could be lost. With such independence, the loss of such things is no longer felt as loss, but met with a kind of serene indifference — not an indifference towards the good things in one’s life, as if they no longer required one’s care and attention, but rather an indifference to oneself and one’s desires as affected by those things.
Indeed, it may well be the case that, by such trials, one learns to perform the delicate and paradoxical balancing act of better caring for and appreciating the good things and people in one’s life while also being unattached to them as objects on which one depends. One learns, in other words, not to take one’s good fortunes for granted: to appreciate and give thanks for them all the more, while not presuming that one has any claim at all upon them. This is the same thing as being poor in spirit, even though one may not be literally poor. It is to remember that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Although you may have much, be the man with nothing to lose.
You could not threaten to starve a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce him to beggary, for he was already a beggar. —G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi
Amen.