At The Bottom Of The Barrel?

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.