It was a hard thing to endure. I don’t know what was harder,
though. Was it the initial shock of suddenly being laid off from my job of
almost 11 years, or was it the realization that I had a stay at home wife,
three kids, and one on the way to take care of without income? I had never seen
it coming. Just two weeks prior I was budgeting the upcoming year and had come
to the realization that I was finally making enough to live comfortably. Then
the floor fell out from under me. I remember going to the van and calling my
wife with the words that I thought that I would never have to utter. And then I
cried. I cried hard. All I remember was asking God over and over again to take
care of us.
“Therefore, I say to you, do not worry about your life, what
you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds
of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your
heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you
by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about
clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil
nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which
today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe
you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:25-30).
After I had collected myself I headed on over to the
Unemployment Office and got that ball rollin’. I then went for a long drive. I
took the “long way home” and just talked to God. I was still in shock and often
wondered if I was dreaming or if I was some part of a sick joke. I expected my
phone to ring at some point with my now former bosses saying that I had been
“punked” and for me to come back to work. Slowly reality was setting in.
My wife had bumped up her midwife appointment to that
morning, and so once I had gotten home and stopped hugging and holding her, the
kids and us got in the van and left. By this point our church had been notified
through email and, as I was in the van during the appointment, I notified my
parents. The appointment was over and we made our way back home. The thought kept
repeating itself over and over again- will we be OK?
As we pulled into the carport a most shocking sight welcomed
us- groceries. Not just a few either. Someone from church went out to Sam’s
Club and went to town. Huge jugs of spaghetti sauce, a huge sack of flour, lots
of bananas, dish detergent, toilet paper, paper towels, and then some. It took a
while for us to get it all into the house. I knew at that point that we would
be alright. In God’s sovereign will He had put me in this place and he would
see to it that we would be cared for.
“So, it was that quails came up at evening and covered the
camp, and in the morning the dew lay all around the camp. And when the layer of
dew lifted, there, on the surface of the wilderness, was a small round
substance, as fine as frost on the ground. So, when the children of Israel saw
it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was.
And Moses said to them, ‘This is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.’”
(Exodus 16:13-15).
I was unemployed for seven months. I had submitted almost
200 job applications and resumes and got almost the same amount of rejections
in return. But during that time of uncertainty and discouragement God was in
control. It was only a couple of days after I had lost my job that my Mom had
mailed us a very, very generous check to help us out. Because my job was a
uniformed job I didn’t have very many clothes to wear during the five-day week
so that certainly helped with having to buy clothes. Another family member paid
our rent for one month. My father mailed us a good amount of money too. Now
these events are what you would expect from family members when one loses their
job, but it went even further than that in God’s provision.
With the unemployment benefits we still came up short by
several hundred dollars for our needs. Our church provided this short coming,
which was applied to our rent. So, our needs were being met per month. However,
on my final month of unemployment, we had a mission’s conference. Because of
the money that was invested in this, one of our deacons approached me and
apologetically informed me that they couldn’t help us with rent. I felt a
calming peace come over me and I told him that it was OK, because God would
provide it. Sure enough, a few days later, my Mom unexpectedly sent a check for
the exact amount that was needed to cover rent for that month. I didn’t tell
her of our need, so only God could have laid it on her heart to do so. On
another occasion, our van’s catalytic converter had failed and needed to be
repaired. Obviously, we didn’t have the money to cover the cost. Then a dear
brother from church GAVE me the several hundred dollars needed for the repair.
Also, on another occasion, the throttle control on the van was failing and was
causing the van to stop accelerating while I was in the middle of driving down
the road. I often had to drift over to the side of the road and restart the
hooptie jalopy. My Mom cut the check to cover that expense, as well as sending
us a little money throughout the months during my endless (and sometimes
hopeless) search for employment.
“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33).
You usually hear about these blessings from other people’s
testimonials and think to yourself “Man, nothing like that ever happens to me”.
It’s the kind of stuff that you read about in Guideposts or something of that
nature. However, there was one more final blessing that you usually hear about,
and that is “paying it forward”. It happened one night when I stopped to pick
up a pizza for dinner. Friday nights are our “pizza night” in our home. This
was the last Friday before I was to start my new job and I ran into a fellow
church member and his son while at the pizza shop. I had to still wait for our
pizza whereas he already had his ready. When I went in to get mine I was
surprised to find that it had already been paid for.
“And it will be that you shall drink from the brook, and I
have commanded the ravens to feed you there. So he went and did according to
the word of the Lord, for he went and stayed by the Brook Cherith, which flows
into the Jordan. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and
bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the brook.” (1 Kings 17:4-6).
The lesson that I had learned in the seven months that I was
unemployed is that God is in control. When He has you where you least expect
it, like at what we may think is “the bottom of the barrel”, He never forsakes
us. Trials come our way to strengthen us and to draw us closer to Him. My faith
in God had certainly become solid during this period of my life where many
would be staring hopelessness in the eyes. However, when I was at the bottom of
the barrel, I was staring into my Lord’s eyes the whole time.
In Christ Alone.
I would like to thank
you, my two or three devoted readers, for following this blog ministry of mine.
It has been many years since God has called me to preach and this has been my
outlet for doing such. However, I have decided to indefinitely suspend any
future blog posts with the possibility of shutting this down completely. I hope
and trust that this blog has blessed you in some way and may God bless you in
your daily walk with Him.
