What a summer! I hardly know where to begin. One of the late, great Beattles once said "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans," and he was absolutely right. We had plans, and, well, let me start at the beginning.
About October of last year, we attended the retirement ceremony of a good friend and pastor and his wife, a couple who had befriended us and helped us grow exponentially during those difficult Navy years. On the way home, Seth confessed that he had for some time (nearly all his life) been struggling with a call to the ministry. He felt he couldn't ignore it anymore. I was delighted. And so we began gradually shaping our lives around what it would take to turn my husband into a military hospital chaplain. We looked for seminaries nearby or with online programs. We considered ways to cut down his working hours. We took a good hard look at our budget to decide what we could do without.
At the end of the school year, Seth was enrolled at George Fox University. They have an online Masters of Divinity in Chaplaincy that will let him focus either in military or hospitals, and they're only forty minutes away for those things which have to be done in person. His situation at work was a little testy due to a change in management, but things were rolling along. The G.I. Bill had come through marvelously on all of his educational expenses. I was looking for full time work, teaching or otherwise, so that Seth could step down from his job and get something part time that would allow him to focus on school. We ruled out the possibility of an extended summer vacation this year because vacation time would have to be spent on school functions. At the same time, we took a leap of faith and enrolled the Boo in a local Christian school, which we felt would be better for her education all around. That was quite the leap when we expected our income to go down materially, and we experienced some hesitation before and after we made the decision (and the deposit), but we were confident that God would provide.
The school year ended. The job search commenced. Vacation Bible School came and went. I applied studiously and had a couple of interviews but nothing really turned up. I put a sign on my computer that said, "You do not provide for this family. God does." Seth represented our church classis (regional body) at Synod (our denomination's annual gathering) and came home with a sense of real peace that God was going to provide the right situation for us, and that as soon as I found work, he would quit his job. I got reading glasses.
Then about halfway through July, I was coming home after an interview, and Seth met me at the door at three o'clock wearing shorts and a t-shirt, not his usual business attire. "Well," he told me. "We can go camping now."
His manager had called him in and told him, "You're just not the right fit for where this department is going. You can go home."
I did not freak out. There were no tears, hyperventilations, panicked questions, or recriminations. We had been praying fervently for a sign to tell us when Seth should leave that job. That was the sign. I did however, experience a sudden dropping sensation in my stomach which made my head reel, and I didn't same anything coherent for several minutes. In fact, reeling is a good word for what I've been doing this whole summer. Over and over, I've found myself saying, "Wow, where did that come from?"
So we went camping. We went to visit my folks because my sister was home from Iowa. Seth's severance and vacation pay were enough to get us through the first couple of months, so he applied for unemployment and started putting his resume out. He went to a technical hiring conference in Seattle, and interviewed for positions like the one he had been in, and we started looking at housing prices in places like Roseburg, OR; Walla Walla, WA, or Boseman , MT.
The companies liked him, but nobody called.
We celebrated his grandmother's 80th birthday. And nothing seemed to be developing. Unemployment didn't come through. I got several polite rejections notices and considerably more silence. The fruit in the backyard started coming ripe. We went to a couple of minor league baseball games.
Then in the middle of August, Seth had a face-to-face class with his online classmates. He went to George Fox Seminary for an intensive, week long meet and greet, and in one of these greetings, his professor said to the class, "You're all working professionals. You're going to face the temptation to maneuver school in around work. Remember, this is your calling. This is what God wants you to do, and it is your primary occupation, along with your family and your faith. Your job needs to work in around your schooling."
Seth came home and said to me, "I realized that I had been trying to fit school in around work because the jobs I was looking at would be just as intense as the job I lost, but how could I manage full time school and full time work and you and Boogaloo. Right then, I decided that I'm not going to trust myself and I'm not going to trust the government. I'm going to trust God."
People often preface what comes next with the observation that God has a sense of humor. I don't think God thought it was funny anymore than he was laughing when he spoke to the prophets; I think it just takes these kinds of moments to teach us that God does provide. On that very day, we received two letters. One was from the Unemployment Agency, saying that Seth's unemployed status had been confirmed, and they were depositing his claims into his account retroactively. The second was from the VA, saying that Seth had been judged eligible for an increased housing allowance while he is in school, some $400 a month more than we had been expecting. A week later, our insurance agent called to offer us a settlement on a minor car accident we'd had in February. And substitute teaching starts next week. He was just waiting for us to believe.
It's enough. It's nothing definite, but it's enough. I had the feeling from the moment that Seth lost his job that this was going to be a year of testing. Can I, can we, trust God with the big things, the health and welfare of our family, the continuance of our lives? That is the question He is asking us because how on earth can we go to people who have had their lives turned upside down and bring them comfort if our faith hasn't been tried, and we haven't found that God is good and worth recommending in all things? I have the feeling that this won't be the last time this year that we approach life and finances holding our breath, but eventually, we will know for sure that the only thing that matters is God.
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