Culture, Prayer, and Praise

I do intend to talk about all three of the topics on the subject line, so forgive me in advance if this meanders. It might be best to consider it a narrative.

I don't remember who I told about this so I'll revisit it. A little less than a year ago, I lost my job. The details aren't all that important. I didn't like that job anymore and was not shy about crossing the boss when I thought he was screwing up, the boss was betting all his money on a losing product and draining the company reserves, the new salesman was the very epitome of the dirty sales weasel such that his very existence disgusted me to the core, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. I never was paid all that well and my wife had stopped working when our daughter was born, so we'd been living paycheck to paycheck for several months and had even had to repeatedly go to our parents for assistance. As you can imagine, the day I was sent home was a day of massive prayer. Each was answered. Several friends and family members stepped in and provided the support we needed that saw us through a terrifying time (re-shout out to the GC and Manzabar).

While we've been making it through since then, it's been just barely. I've mostly been fine with that, because it's better than some, and I feel that part of my faith in God is that I shouldn't worry about being provided for as long as I do my part. God has indeed been faithful to us. In fact, even though my salary at this job is less than it was at the job I lost, we haven't had to ask for any help this year. According to the budget we worked up, we're overspending our income by $300 each month, but in reality we continually squeak by with a few dollars to spare. In short, we've had a lot to be thankful for in this past year. Even so, with the downturn in the economy and the sharp upturn in gas prices, I was starting to feel despair. It's not at all that I began losing faith in God, it is that I lost faith in myself to continue to maintain my end of the bargain.

I've shared this before but it bears repeating. I know that a lot of people always shoot for "proper" prayer. They ask for things that they think God will approve of and try to keep their prayer sessions to certain guidelines. I think all of that is silly. God knows your inmost heart anyway, so by not talking to Him about that stuff, do you think you're hiding it from Him somehow? The whole purpose of prayer is to have that open chat session with God about anything and everything. The important thing to be mindful of in prayer is your attitude, not the subject matter. So, for the past several months, it's been routine for me to tack on "and please give us x dollars" in most every prayer.

As it so happens, our church has been searching for a new senior pastor for the last several months (in case I inadvertently started a suspense mill, no I'm not about to be a pastor, this is a parallel story). We located one, but it's going to be a rare setup. Our church and another church are each going to pay half of one man's salary. He will preach at our church first, then travel to the other church and preach there. I've seen the man preach twice now and I think he'll be a great leader for our congregation. Unfortunately for some of us, the change required the church I attend to adjust its service time from 10:30AM to 9:00AM. This is a major problem for my family.

My daughter tends to wake up anywhere from 8:30 to 9:15. We could adjust that backward to attempt to accommodate the new start time, but that of course means putting her to bed earlier at night. I currently work about 40 miles from home, and given that A) whoever decided on the layout of this town should really have gone into pretzel-making instead and B) if the average Eastern Iowan thinks as slow as they drive then they're all still wondering what to have for breakfast yesterday, it averages as an hour-long commute. That means that I get home somewhere between 5:45 and 6:15. We immediately have dinner, which as anyone experienced with young children knows is a fairly lengthy production. We typically get that all wrapped up around 7:00. That gives me about one good hour with my daughter before she enters her late-night fussy-because-I'm-tired mode. In order to adjust my daughter's sleep schedule to fit the church's new schedule, I would have to sacrifice that one good hour. In all honesty, if this were China and I were extremely limited on choices to attend a worship service, I might consider making the sacrifice. Luckily for me, this is America and I have lots of choices, so the only real dilemma is that I have to walk away from a congregation that I know and love in search of another that may or may not live up to the standards I have for a church.

Since I and/or my wife volunteer for nearly every department our church has, I sent a notification e-mail to all the volunteer teams of our intent to leave the church shortly after the time change was announced. I received several responses, mostly general "aww-shucks-wish-you-well" sorts of things. Our associate pastor's wife sent an e-mail asking if anything could be changed, to which I replied with a version of the previous paragraph. In response, she asked if she could pray that Lanira would wake up early only on Sundays (jokingly, of course). I replied back that it might help if she prayed that I got a different job that got me home earlier instead.... and suddenly it was as if Carlos Mencia leaned through the window and slapped me upside the head with a trademark "dee-duh-dee!" God's not going to send somebody to my house and just dump a job in my lap! So I got on the Internet and looked.

Now, I have a little problem when job searching, and that is that I dropped out of college for circumstances that made sense at the time. I've never had a good opportunity to go back and finish it up. Local employers tend to skip past my years of experience, field certifications, and stellar references and go straight to my lack of formal college education, then summarily file-13 my resume. I've learned the hard way that there are certain institutions and business types that it is counterproductive for me to invest the time and energy of building a targeted resume and cover letter for. So, out of the fifty or so potential listings that I was qualified to do, had any interest in, were sufficiently closer to home, were likely to pay well enough, and would potentially call me for an interview, I ended up with a heartening list of exactly two candidates. After spending some time researching both companies, I eliminated one of those two. I suppose, in retrospect, that if I had really thought through the odds I would have probably not even bothered with applying for the remaining position. However, I wasn't busy at the time and figured I had nothing to lose even moreso than usual. My current job is a long way from home and only pays just enough to cover our bills, but that is the sum total of my complaints about this place. How many people only dream of having a job with a complaint list that short? The culture here is tremendous, my boss works as hard as everyone else and is a decent human being, I can work from home on a semi-regular basis, my duties are challenging but not frustrating, I sit across a cubicle wall from a very good friend (without whom I would not have gotten this job), and a huge number of other things that make this a fantastic place to work. So, I suppose I didn't overly care much whether or not I actually got a callback. At least I would be able to say that I tried to do something about my situation instead of passively letting it happen to me.

Significantly more upbeat because I'd actually done something, I went back to my life as usual, happy as a clam again.

The next morning at work, my e-mail notifier popped up a message that I'd received an e-mail from a friend from a previous position (if you're keeping track, it's the job before the job I was "let go" from, where I came to know the GC and Manzabar and a lot of other great people). Only a couple of days prior, I'd seen a business with his family name and casually wondered what he was up to and how one might contact him, so I was surprised. Naturally, I also wondered how he'd gotten my e-mail address. I was more than a little surprised to find that he'd gotten it from my resume: he was the person who would be handling interviews and hiring decisions at the one job I'd applied for. Now, I'd never gotten to know him real well, but we'd spent some time together on a few business trips and I know he's a good person and a Christian to boot.

I went to the interview, of course, and it turns out that I and this company will be a good fit for each other. That alone is enough for some serious praise as it is a major answer to prayer. I no longer have to make this horrible daily drive and leave so early and get home so late. We're still not certain we'll be able to adjust our lives to make the 9 AM service, but at least it's in the realm of possibility. Now, the story could stop there and would still be happy. It gets better.

When salary negotiation came up, I put forth a number. Some would say it's less than I'm worth (actually a few people did say that), but I felt it was realistic given that I do not have formal education and that all I really want is to make a living and be able to provide for my family. The number I asked for was (duh) more than what I need to fulfill those requirements. After taking time to deliberate, the company came back with a range. For a moment, if you would, review the third paragraph of this narrative before proceeding. The bottom of the offered range was x greater than what I'm making right now. The top of the range is x dollars greater than what I was making at the job I was "let go" from. How cool is that? After telling me about the range offered, the guy took me on a tour of the facility during which we talked about the things I envisioned I would recommend doing to solve various IT challenges. Since he and I had parted ways for about two years, this helped him to see just what sort of things I had gained experience with during that time period. At the end of it, he stated in no uncertain terms to the people who be signing the check that I should be offered the high end of the range. Naturally I accepted. The real kicker: due to the dramatically shortened driving distance, the total net income increase, even accounting for higher tax rates, will still be on the high side of x dollars. How's that for an answer to prayer?

Additionally, after it was all said and done, my friend told me that he too had put the dilemma of needing to hire someone to his church group as a prayer. He told me a bit about the person that had left that I would be replacing. He doesn't seem like a bad person or anything, but then again he could be total scum of the earth and you'd never know it from talking to this guy because he would just never talk about anyone that way. It does seem that this individual had at least a few personality traits that did not mesh well with my friend, so he prayed for a few traits in whoever was ultimately selected for the job that apparently I have. Part of it that is as important to him as it would be to me was that he at least get a person who could be accepting of his faith, even if that person didn't share in it.

I'm shifting gears a bit here but this all ties together. My poor little girl is cutting molars right now which makes nights for all of us somewhat miserable. We are working toward transitioning her into her crib but when she wakes up in the middle of the night in pain we always bring her back into our bed. If left next to my wife, she'll nurse for comfort nearly all night, which does put strain on my wife. So, to at least try to help out a bit (and because I'm insanely selfish), I'll steal the baby to my side of the bed. After acquiring her at about 4:30 this morning, I was suddenly struck with a bout of sleeplessness. That's not too bad because I'd fallen asleep on the couch while reading. It seemed a great time for a prayer session. Now, you have to understand that my life revolves almost completely around my daughter. She is the joy of my life and the sun never shines as brightly as when she smiles. Because of that, I make it a point to do my best to thank God for her each and every day. When I get a good quiet moment like I had this morning, I always open up my prayer with a big long "thank you!" for her. After that, I went ahead and gave thanks for all the other things in my life too, including my wife and of course all the things involved in the story I just told and several other things that I haven't talked about. It took a while to get through it all. At the end of it, I said "I just can't believe how much You've blessed me!"... and then I had to stop.

I think it's a cultural thing, really. What was the source behind the "I can't believe" part of that remark? Why couldn't I believe it? I know what God is like. I know what he's about. Sure, it required handling several strings of occurrences to put together that I was in a position to be looking for a new job at exactly the same time as someone that wanted to hire me was looking to hire someone like me with the talents I possess that only could have been obtained by enduring some things that I felt were absolute torture at the time. Sure, it took some behind-the-scenes finessing to present me with numbers that were exactly what I was searching for. Sure, it took some real masterwork to ensure that precisely the exact gene combination from mine and my wife's material would result in the gorgeous combination that is my daughter. Sure, it took something I can't even conceive of to give this child that personality that makes her the dream of every parent. All of that is certainly amazing to us as humans, but God wouldn't even break a sweat dealing with it, and I know that. I suppose I could say that I can't believe I'm worthy of these blessings, but God's word repeatedly says that my "worthiness" has nothing to do with it, and I know that too. So from whence comes this "I can't believe"? I think it's just something I've picked up that I should endeavor to remove from my vernacular. I can believe it because I'm living it.