We will be thankful - even for the fleas in life!

Corrie ten Boom's story The Hiding Place contains one of my favorite reminders about the Lord's direction to us to be thankful, as much for the annoying or even painful parts of life as for the blissful times. Her sister insists on giving thanks in her concentration camp prayers, even for the fleas with which they must contend in their barracks. The sisters eventually came to learn that the fleas were what kept their captors out of their barracks, thus giving the devoted pair the opportunity to read and study the Bible together. Corrie's sister had told her to be thankful, even for the fleas; her life was forever blessed for those fleas!

So we're acknowledging our family's "fleas", but we are going to continue to give thanks for them. Some of them bring blessings we can feel and see right away; some will take more patience and faith than others. All will be for our overall experience and eventual good ... we hope.

So let's talk about the relatively little, more tangible things first.

* Our cars. Grrr. Fleas, both of them! Imagine me in the rain, running back and forth from side to side of the car, trying to get the key to work in just one of the locks. Imagine my 4 kids waiting for me to get any one door open so we can squish into the car, where the heat may or may not be working but will surely not be working well, the door-open indicator light will stay on even if I've re-slammed and checked every door, and countless other non-inspection-passing problems will loom. None of this even takes into the account the fact that this car is quite painful for me to even sit in, much less drive. My back issues scream at me the entire time I'm sitting in this car. But at least we have it. We have a second car to cover us when the minivan won't start (which it has been doing quite often - so much so that we had to further stretch our budget to include the purchase of a new battery) and when the daddy needs to take the minivan on one of his many out-of-town scheduled work trips. We are definitely blessed to have a mechanic who we love and trust and who will work our needs into his hectic schedule so often!

* It's been unusually cold here in the last couple of weeks. Nights have been in the low 30's until this week. Several days didn't get a whole lot warmer. We haven't had any heat in our house, unfortunately. Friends at church offered to help us pay for someone to fix it when they heard about the situation, but we decided it's really not such a bad thing for our boys to know that hard times can actually be hard and that we don't always get what ever we want right when we want it and just because we want it. We've just been bundling up more, sitting a little closer to each other, and being thankful for the more normal weather we've had this week.


Then there are some less tangible, but deeply impactful situations for us to deal with.


* I took a job! I'm working at the theatre where the boys are performing. It's also run by my friend, so my friend and fellow church member is also my boss. I'm the assistant director in the current play (which started a few weeks ago and will wrap up on December 20th - and I take it on like I have nothing at all to do with my time during this particular season. Lol.) I do get some income and I also get BOTH of the boys' tuitions included - woo hoo! I also love the time I get in the car with my big boys. Most of it is spent singing together or talking about things they are very happy about, which is priceless time when they're such grumpy adolescents on a regular basis. My schedule is horrifyingly overwhelming these days, but I'm hoping the boys will one day know that I put in all this time and work to give them the gift of this experience.

I get the right of first refusal for the next play, too, which is going to be AWESOME. We just recently applied for all 3 of the boys to be in that one. This theater thing seems to be infectious - in a good way. More about this job's effect on our lives in a moment.

* Another good news-bad news thing is that my husband got a new job! He's excited about this company and that's a good thing. I want him to love what he does, you know? They can't match his last salary, but we're hoping that other benefits and the possible bonus will make it at least comparable. The company is based in our neighboring state and he'll have to travel there and throughout his territory regularly, but he'll be based out of our home. His territory is every state between NC and TX that touches water. Clearly, he's going to be gone a whole lot more. None of us is very thrilled about that.

That takes me back to my job thing. With the dad being gone more, I'm trying to figure out how to do MY job without having my two younger kids become too much of a nuisance at the theatre. I will have to take them with me some nights. This should be an interesting juggling act! As I wonder which would be the fleas in this case - my kids or the job - I realize I'm going to have to say neither, actually, since I wouldn't wish away either my kids or this opportunity under any circumstances I can imagine. I'm glad I've at least temporarily got the option to take the kids with me sometimes when I do this job.

* I'm also giving a lot of time and energy to a play we're doing at church. We'll be performing for the women's groups (called Relief Society) from my ward (church members who go at the same time I do and live in the same geographical zone) and my SIL's ward. It's the biggest deal of the year for us, and the biggest production we've ever tried to pull off. We're going to do a portrayal of the parable of the Ten Virgins. I've adapted and rewritten the script twice already, cast 11 parts, and dealt with 12 women's needs, schedules, and feelings. I'm also going to be acting and doing the first solo I've ever sung in front of this large of a group. Although it's emotionally and physically taxing, I think the spiritual rewards will be worth the work.

Every glass is both half-filled AND half-empty, right? Even glasses that are almost empty have something to offer. Glasses that are empty once held something that can be remembered and appreciated.

We are having our own last supper, of sorts.

I just made dinner for the kids and me. I made some for Michael, too, but he is staying at his office quite late today. He's cleaning out his office, to be exact. After all, tonight is the last night before he goes in for his last day at his current company.

We're hoping this lay-off or whatever it's supposed to be called will lead to an even better opportunity. He had such high hopes for this company, but we see now that some things were not only never going to progress, but were actually changing for the worse.

Does that mythical company where hard work and talent are rewarded by gratitude, increased trust, increased pay, job security, and - dare to dream - possibly a little bit of recognition even exist? He doesn't do what he does for the recognition, by any means. He does what he does because he loves it. From the sound of his evaluations, his business contacts, and his trainees, it sounds like he does it extremely well, too. It's just hard to see him being subject to the whims of the business world. In his heart of hearts, he wants to be with one company for the rest of his career, building a program from nothing and making it the most outstandingly effective, best run program the pharma or mental health field has ever seen. He used to think he wanted to be a vice president or CEO of one of these companies, but he's since decided that he probably isn't heartless enough to do what they do so often.

I don't think I'll post all the details of how this particular loss came about. I'll just write the basics of what's happened. A couple of weeks ago, Michael called me from his office. He sounded absolutely sick; I could just imagine his face looking ashen and his head and shoulders hanging low. He had the feeling he was about to lose his job. His immediate superior at the company had denied that anything was going on, saying that he had no problems with the job Michael was doing. Still, we're sure he was given this prompting for a reason, so we began to prepare for the worst.

The most painful part of this experience for him has been his confusion over the whole situation. How could he get the rave reviews and evaluations he's been getting, but then have his legs cut right out from under him? If he hadn't pressed his supervisor that next Monday and finally told him that he KNEW something was going on, we don't know when the company would have broken all this to Michael. As it turns out, the man was planning to have Michael teach this last group of trainees, then make his last day the same as the last day of the training class. That brings us back to tomorrow.

So tomorrow is his last day. He's not being fired. He didn't do anything wrong. In fact, he's been doing an excellent job and has received excellent feedback from trainees, from employees in the field, from outside contacts he's worked with on behalf of the company, and from other supervisors. The company is just going a different direction and won't be needing the service he provides any more. They want someone else to do the small part of his job that they'll continue to need - someone who can also do another job for which Michael is not qualified.

Still, the whole thing just feels creepy. He only knows of one person in this office of dozens who knows that he'll be leaving at all, much less that tomorrow is the last time he'll be in that office. Can you imagine their confusion when they see him go home tomorrow, leaving an empty office behind? No farewell luncheon, no gold watch, no expressions of concern and good luck for Michael and his family. Conveniently for the company, they won't even have to pay out his end-of-year bonus, most of which he has already earned. Conveniently for his supervisor, the guy isn't even going to be in the office tomorrow. (We suspect that before Michael had pushed for information about is own fate, the supervisor had planned to have the HR woman hand him a severance package agreement just after all these trainees were supposed to leave tomorrow. As it is, they barely got it to him before his last day.) Why is this feeling like such a shameful thing when he didn't do anything wrong? Are they afraid the other employees would revolt, demanding that he be kept on or they'll all walk out? (Not likely, but somewhat of a satisfying fantasy.)

He is pretty sure his semi-replacement is already hired and is just waiting in the wings to occupy his office. In fact, he's completely sure because some dolt at the conference he was supposed to attend next week has recently sent an email with the new guy's name on it to Michael's email address. Duh. It seems the new guy is coming on just in time to get a free trip to San Diego!

So we'll say we're on to bigger and better things. I've been helping rewrite and adjust his resumes and objectives so the things we highlight are geared toward the different jobs for which he's been applying. (Not easy to do when you've got training classes to teach just about every minute of your last 2 weeks.) It's fun to see him getting excited about the possibilities at these new places, seeing how his particular set of qualifications fits so uniquely into some of these job descriptions. It's good to see him have hope that he may find that mythical company one day. Most importantly, we keep praying for the wisdom to know which of these opportunities (and others that may be yet to come) will turn out to be the right one, the strength to make it through whatever we have to go through until he gets a new job, the confidence to proceed with whatever changes we may have to make, and the patience to have it all happen according to the Lord's timetable rather than our own.