So far this time of not working has been a lot busier (and better) than two years ago when I spent about two months not working.

The last time, Matt and I had just married and moved into our new apartment. We hadn’t been at Calvary for very long, and most of my friends were working during the day. I would spend all day unpacking and organizing our apartment with little interaction (PS doesn’t count, she sleeps too much during the day). So when Matt would get home, it was definitely the highlight of my day. I felt like a repressed 1950′s Stepford wife.

I was a little afraid some of those feelings might come back this time. But I’ve actually had the opposite – plenty to fill my days. I have a couple of friends in the area who are job searching or in school, and it’s been wonderful to catch up with them and have some company during the day. We’re also much more integrated into our church now, so there are always plenty of people I can connect with. I’m still working on my book manuscript and I’m also doing a few website projects for friends and family.

My brain is a lot more engaged this time around – with relationships and with work. I’m grateful that God is giving me this time to accomplish a lot and to invest in relationships that I just didn’t have as much time for before.

Recently, Matt and I have started sharing three things with each other that we’re thankful for at the end of each day. It’s a time to focus on the blessings God has given us, since it’s far too easy to dwell on the challenges and trials of life.

What are you thankful for today?

A few weeks ago, our pastor preached about unjust authority. At the time, I thought it was a great message, but didn’t see any immediate application to my life.

How wise is the God who sees the past, present, and future. He truly knows exactly what we need and when.

Now just weeks later, this message is my lifeline to warding off bitterness and depression.

When I first came to work at Matt’s company, I wasn’t very attached to the job or the company. I had never heard of it before Matt started working there, but my personality is such that I put 110% into anything I do. So the longer I stayed and the more roles I was put into, the more I began to care – not just about my own success, but about the success of the company in general. I would get emotionally upset whenever we didn’t take advantage of opportunities to make more money and to be more successful. I wasn’t paid based on commission, so it honestly had nothing to do with my own sense of reward or compensation. It was just that I had invested myself wholeheartedly into doing my job and doing it well.

So when I heard that I was being let go due to economic cutbacks, I felt disappointed that my hard work didn’t make a difference long-term. But I realized that it was for the best, that indeed, the company did need to save money, and that it would allow me to accomplish some things personally that I hadn’t been doing because I had been working so much.

But then I found out some other things. Like that at the same time I was being told that I would be let go, the entire company was getting a memo that explained what was happening and who was being let go. Some of the people who were affected by this (either through losing a management position or being let go themselves) had heard nothing about it until they were reading the memo at the same time as the rest of the company. We’re not a Fortune 500 company with far too many people to treat them like anything but cattle. We have about 20 or 30 people at most. It would have been logistically easy to personally tell everyone affected about the decision before it was passed out in a company memo.

In addition, I was pretty surprised when I found out that I was the only manager who was actually let go. The rest received different positions, and even people who were supposed to be “below” me on the totem pole were given rearranged responsibilities, but not let go.

I’ve spent multiple night working for this company until 2 am, making images, setting up promotions, writing copy. Working overtime even though I was on a salaried paycheck with no extra compensation for my hard work, just because I knew that it was expected of me to get extra promotions done. I felt almost crazy all of fourth quarter because things were so busy with the holidays. I had tried to get my boss to make decisions about holiday promotions months before the holidays approached, because I knew how crazy it would be if we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare in advance. But as usual, he made up his mind a few days before Thanksgiving weekend about the specific sales we would run. Every day over Thanksgiving week, I worked until past midnight making sure everything was ready to go in time for the next day’s sale.

Meanwhile, several of the people who were not let go during the past two weeks were on vacation, not working a bit. It’s just a job, just a paycheck to many of them. And it hurts that even though I gave more of myself than that, it wasn’t appreciated or rewarded.

So unjust authority means a lot more to me now. I am grateful that God was preparing me and also speaking to me through some timely words at Sunday school the week I found out about the lay-offs. Come what may, my work ethic has to be because of Him, not because of the promise of earthly compensation or recognition.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism. -Colossians 3:23-4

Kirk Franklin has an amazing trio of songs on his album, Hero. They’re called “Let it Go,” “The Process,” and “Imagine Me.”

“Let it Go” is about his childhood and early adult years before he knew Christ. Life was bad, people hurt him, he hurt others. He went through some seriously painful issues, and he does not hold back about revealing them all in this song.

“Imagine Me” is this beautiful ballad about trusting God. The chorus says:

Imagine me
Being free,
Trusting You totally.
Finally I can
Imagine me.
I admit it was hard to see
You being in love with someone like me,
But finally, I can
Imagine me.

And then there’s “The Process.” It has no words – it’s just this hauntingly sweet instrumental transition between the two songs. I always liked it, but today as I’m thinking about the deeper meaning to it and how it applies to my life, I’m liking it even more.

Sometimes in “The Process” from darkness to light, from sorrow to joy, from bad to good, there are simply no words. Just a hauntingly sweet melody of the Lord playing over you in the midst of your pain. He doesn’t usually seem to snap His fingers and make everything great overnight. There’s a process of healing and restoration.

He’s been dealing with me about this for some time now, but I was struck this weekend once again at how beautifully He coordinates the song of our lives. He knows exactly what He’s doing.

Well, I was going to try to fit all of this into a Facebook status update, but I figured that would get ridiculously long. So here’s a blog post instead (for our five readers…I’ll have to work more on SEO and advertising our blog)

I should have plenty of time for blogging now since I got laid off yesterday. The awesome part is that if I want my severance pay, I have to keep working for the next 2 weeks, but then I get paid for another month beyond that. So the next 2 weeks are going to be pretty miserable since every time I see my bosses, I get angry and every time I see my coworkers, there are tears and sympathy glances.

After the 2 weeks of working are finished, I think it will feel a lot sweeter to have free time and get stuff done. And hopefully I will be able to forget about the bazillion hours of unpaid overtime and tears, sweat, and frustration wasted for nothing. Right now while I’m still working, it’s hard to forget about it. Matt will still working there, which might be a little hard, but he thinks he can deal with the uh, management style.

In other news, we ordered an Xbox Kinect last week from Best Buy and it arrived yesterday. So I got fired and got an Xbox all in the same day. Coincidental? I think not.

Matt and I played the 2 games we have last night (Dance Central and Kinect Adventures) and they are super fun and an amazing workout. (Matt said Kinect Adventures could even take the place of his P90x workout for the day, it was so intense.)

Also, I have taken all of this as a sign that I should definitely join the Songwriters Group at my church. So I wrote a song today. It’s called “Morning is Coming (Watch and Pray).”

I’m excited to get back into being creative for the sake of creativity (instead of to sell products), to catch up with old friends, and to get a lot of stuff done around the house that’s been neglected. And of course, to update our blog more regularly! Till next time…