things i can not comprehend.

so as a part of the reading plan that i have started this year for Lent (and beyond) i have been making my way through the book of Job. up until now, i thought i understood this story: Job is a good guy. Satan gets permission from God to torture Job. Job loses everything. His wife says 'curse God and die.' Job remains faithful and God blesses him. the end. what i never knew was that all this happens within 39 verses. (the first 32 and the last 7 if you wanted to know) who knew that the book of Job was 42 chapters long? not me. the whole rest of the book is conversation between Job and his 3 friends who came to comfort him. this is where i start to lose the story. i really have trouble understanding what everyone here is saying. apparently the friends aren't doing so good a job of being comforting, because Job keeps having to respond to everything they say. it seems like they're arguing, but as i read it, they all seem to be saying the same things in general. whats with the disagreement? i must be missing something. or maybe everyone else is missing something. maybe i just have the extended version of Job in my Bible and everyone else's is only 39 verses long.
for a long time in my life, i avoided the book of Job like the plague. it was suggested to me that i should read it during a really low point in my life, but i thought that just seemed a little cliche, and besides that i already knew the 39 verse version of the story, so i just never read it. now that i've started, it seems to have brought up more questions than it has answered for me. why DO bad things happen to good people? does the Devil hand-pick ALL the people that seem to be going through Hell on earth? Why does God just sit back and let us suffer and give Satan the power to bring us to our knees and lower? how would i react to the loss of everyone i most loved? and what in the world are Job's friends talking about?
maybe its not for me to know the reasons why. maybe all i need to know is that the same God who allows pain and devastation into our lives is the same one who will, in His great love, pick us up and put us back together again.
my thoughts and prayers and love go out to my sister's sister-in-law and her family. by God's grace may you have the strength to praise God through this storm.