Be Still

I wrote one other post that was more of a testimony (I'll Keep Holding on to Jesus) and now I find myself doing that again. I'm not trying to do anything other than share how God has worked in my life and to life Him up. Perhaps this is not the greatest forum for my personal testimonies, but until something better comes along, I will occasionally make use of my blog for such. It is my blog after all.

Friday morning June 27, 2003, I received a call from my boss asking me to come and see him. I wasn't expecting to be laid off, but when I got that call, I knew that that's what was happening. I only spent about as much time in his office as it took me to drive over there, and I walked out with papers that stated I was no longer an employee of the company I'd worked at for over four years. To be honest, the worst part of it up until that time was just how taken off guard I was.

As I was driving home that morning, still before lunch time, what had happened was just starting to sink in, and I was started getting upset. I had only been out of work before for a week in my entire life, and I didn't have two children and another one on the way at that time (my wife was 8 months pregnant at this time). Needless to say this wasn't a good time for me to be out of work, and work in the IT field was just starting to dry up, especially in Michigan, so I knew finding another job wouldn't be a simple undertaking. I was starting to ask myself why this was happening to me.

I remember think all these things for about the first mile of my way home before the Lord impressed on me the second half of Psalms 37:25 "yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." Over and over in my head I heard these words repeating themselves. I knew that God was really speaking to me and was comforting me and by the time I arrived home, I had a faith that God would take care of my situation and saw me where I was.

I was unemployed the rest of the year, and in January of 2004 I was starting to wonder what I was going to do. My third child had been born the August before (less than a week after the country-wide blackout of 03) and all my expenses were rising. I'd used up some of my savings and my unemployment insurance was running out. Still I was holding on to what God impressed on me so many months before and I was trusting God to provide.

In the middle of January I received a call an HR representative from the company I used to work for asking me to come in and interview for a job. I had had very few leads so I went in the next day and interviewed. It went good, but after the interview I didn't hear much for a couple weeks so I didn't think I got the job. I was really starting to get frantic during that last week in January because there just weren't that many IT jobs still and that was also my last week qualifying for unemployment insurance. I really wasn't getting anywhere when I got a call telling me that I got the job and would be starting on Monday. So I moved from unemployment right back to employment with my old company without a break in income.

In December of 2007, after working almost another four years for my company, this was all happening again. I received notice that the contract for the project that I was working on wasn't going to be renewed. This was right at the beginning of the auto companies trying to cut costs and somehow I found myself on the front lines of cost cutting measures. The problem was that in January of 2008, IT jobs in Michigan were even rarer than they were four years earlier, and I really had no clue how I was going to find another job.

I had put my resume out on just a couple job sites, and I received exactly one call in January about it. The job was an excellent fit for me, and even the auto company I contract to wouldn't change, I would just be working for a new contract house doing much of the same stuff. The job was even in a building I was very familiar with, so that was a bonus too. I interviewed early the next week, was talking to the recruiter that I was dealing with and the final results is that on January 29, 2008, I ended my stint at the first company and began working for my new company and even managed to double dip on that day, technically being an employee of both companies for a day.

All the while as I was wondering what my next move in my career would be in December and January, I was reminded of that same scripture, "yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread" and not only that, the scripture Psalms 46:10 also came to mind. It was as if God was telling me, "I took care of this once. Be still and allow me to take care of this again."

It may seem trivial to you that not only am I thankful for the years of employment I've enjoyed in the IT field, but that maintaining employment is important to me. If you have experienced job loss and unemployment, you know that employment is an important part of life. I'm thankful for a God that cares enough about me to not only provide for me when it comes to employment, but also cares enough to comfort me when things are not going my way and remind me that this aspect of my life too He controls.