I may be about to go to bed, so don’t hold me to it, but I think I’m going to say something. Something beyond the standard “sorry it’s been 300 years since I posted last.”
I wrote a while ago that my job was in crisis, the medical definition of crisis being the point at which it will be determined if the patient will live or die. As of last Monday, it was official: the patient died.
It was a bad ending. I don’t want to go into a round of finger pointing, partly because I think I have co-workers who read this site, and partly because that’s just rude. Essentially, there was a difference of opinion between my boss(es) and me about how much a person could accomplish in a single day. My estimate was significantly lower than theirs. I tried my best and squeezed what I was told should be a painless 40 hours worth of work into about 45 hours, on average. If work was really really slow, I could get it all done without overtime, but at anything resembling a normal level of work, I couldn’t keep up.
In my mind there were three possibilities for what was wrong: Either the parameters for one person’s work was wrong, or there was some missing technique to getting it done that I couldn’t find out, or the worker was incompetent. I was under the impression that the parameters were wrong, but obviously, my employers decided that the worker was incompetent.
I don’t really have any hard feelings. I was getting pretty close to quitting anyway. How important, really, is a temp job? The thought of spending the next couple of years of my life under the pressure I felt for a measly $12 an hour was becoming less and less appealing.
The trouble is that, with temporary employment, that whole “two weeks notice” thing doesn’t really work. My original contract for that job was for two weeks. If I called in to my agency and said “hey, I don’t like this job any more. Can you get me a new one?” I would be gone the next day. Which would have been really bad for the people at work because I was the only one who knew how to do my job at all, and it had to be done on time every day. If I just up and quit one day, they would have been in some real hot water, and it just wasn’t the Christian thing to do.
So they hired me a replacement, and I trained him, and they let me go. Everybody’s happy. I’m now unemployed, but everybody’s happy.
My only real problem was that, two weeks ago when they brought in my replacement, I knew he was my replacement, they knew he was my replacement, but what I was told was that he was supposed to be my long asked for second person. This completely confused me. They just let somebody go the week previous because we weren’t allowed to have so many temps when business was so slow. I trained for a week, and the next Sunday I got a phone call that my contract had been terminated.
I am simply amazed at the massive lack of trust they communicated to me.
I’m not very good at picking favorites, so I don’t have a favorite bible verse, but one of my favorites is Romans 8:28—
 
“We know that all things work together for good for those that love God, who have been called according to His purpose.”
Given my uncanny propensity to perceive this whole worlds-realm as a kind of glorified game, my spin on “all things work together for good” comes out something along the lines of “all things work to my advantage,” or “no matter what happens, I win.” I made a friend really angry once, by playing this game—I forget exactly the circumstances, but I had just gotten done explaining that everything always plays into my hand, when she either did something really rotten to me, or she described something really rotten happening to me. I laughed and mildly adjusted the definition of “to my advantage” (that is to say, I turned common sense on its head).
See, the problem is we all think we know what is to our advantage. In fact, I’d bet that most of us put more faith in our knowing what is and what isn’t to our advantage than we put in the goodness of God. So when something truly awful comes along, we reflexively question the goodness of God, when in reality we ought to be questioning whether we know what is really to our advantage.
For instance: Jesus died on the cross. I think most of us can see why the disciples thought that was a bad thing. But I’d also like to think most of us can see how that actually worked out to everybody’s advantage.
So me: I just lost my job. Bad thing. But really, how bad is it? I’m no worse off than I was six months ago. In fact, I’m almost exactly in the same financial position I was in six months ago. Actually, I’m richer by three pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes (really nice ones), new silverware, a trip to my sister’s wedding, and a fish tank. (God forgive me for the fish tank). What’s more, I am now more than ever sure that I do not want a career in the mortgage industry. I’ve never seen a business that was so highly regulated by the government in all my life. Plus, I’ve learned a lot about business management (both good and bad), and the importance of distributed responsibility. I’m now used to working a solid 8-hour shift working on one thing, and despite whatever the news people are saying, the job market is much better now.
Probably the biggest advantage, honestly, is that I feel I’ve gotten a pretty clear sign to wait on the whole seminary thing. If my job hadn’t been so stressful, I might have been able, just barely, to stay in school. But His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.
So I’ve lost my job, and it was a bad break, but I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, this plays directly into my hand. My mom is convinced that God forced me out of my job precisely at this time because he had a better position immediately available for me somewhere else. That sounds good to me, but I’m not quite ready to jump for joy over a job I don’t quite have yet. I know this works out to my advantage, but I can’t guarantee that I know what my advantage is.
neumatikos 