Reflections on a Bad Job History

     I used to kind of be ashamed of how many jobs I've held in my life. At one point, after I'd lost my job around the time my second daughter was born, I thought, "that's it. I'm never going to be employable again." My working life has been kind of eclectic, all things considered.
     A lot of it was woven around the pursuit of a higher education in order to get into ministry, and having to find whatever jobs I could either while attending school, or after having to leave off of school because the money ran out. The schooling as well has been a little eclectic at times too. In high school, my electives were mostly about farming and agriculture as well as autoshop. In College, it was mostly Bible and Theology, but when I realized that educational track wasn't as immediately employable as I had hoped, I went to a technical school for electronics and computer science. Later, I went back to school for psychology, completing at least the requirements for the major itself.
     Looking back, by turns, I have held positions as a reading tutor, a camp counselor, a production worker packaging tools; I've worked at McDonald's, Burger King, and in the print shop of the former headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators running the production copier and doing bindery work. I've worked retail and cashiering at both Walmart and Target (and would later work in the loading dock unloading trucks and stocking). I've worked driving school bus and city handicap buses, and as a groundskeeper. I've worked as a general laborer for a welding outfit, and I've worked operating huge laser drilling machines for circuit board manufacturers. I was a pastoral associate in a parish after being ordained as a priest, and a co-pastor in another parish. I worked in children's homes with mentally and emotionally disturbed children and teenagers. In my last long term position, I worked as an instructional aid for students with medical and developmental disabilities.
     Looking back at all of these now, while I can't say I ever mastered any of them or was the best at them, I can say each position taught me a skillset which, taken separately look pretty randome, but in the context of where I am now on the farm in Kentucky all come together to give me at least the starting point of being able to do everything needed of me here. Had I not gone through all of those trades and experiences, I would truly have been starting at zero here, and I wouldn't have been prepared for it in any way, shape or form. Even the experiences of being stranded in Arkansas and learning how to cut firewood from my uncle there have come into play, or learning how to function without electricity as we did at times in the R.V. for that year kept us from panicking after the tornado left us without power for several days. And my conditioning with extremely cold weather in Wisconsin and Canada really came into play with the bad cold snap this past December. Through all of it we learned to just trust that God had us, and we learned to think outside the box in terms of resourcefulness. Had I and my family not gone through what we have in our lives, we wouldn't have been prepared for this at all.
     And this is my thought which I would like to pass on, that your seemingly bad circumstances today may be preparing you to adapt and weather storms later on that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. That job you lost today may be pushing you on to another one where there's something else you need to learn in order to be prepared for something later. That period of being broke, or hungry, or without modern conveniences like electricity may be teaching you how to look at your resources differently and how to use what you do have instead of pining for what your don't.
     Another interesting story about being hungry is that for a time at one point, all we had to eat was beans. After that, all we had to eat were peas we had gleaned from a field around the house in Idaho. It was maybe two or three weeks. It sucked. We all lost weight. We all questioned why God had brought us into that position. It wasn't until about four or five years later that we learned Heidi actually had Multiple Sclerosis, and that this is what her crippling illness which hit her in 2009 actually was (and this was after seeing multiple doctors between 2009 and 2010 who all gave misdiagnoses). After her second major flare in 2018-19, we learned that severe fasting was one of most effective ways of treating it, and far safer than the medications. What we realized was that if we hadn't been in that situation of hunger, Heidi might not have recovered as fully from that first bad flare as she did. She might not have survived it at all. We had no idea, but God did. Just like I had no idea I was going to need to be a kind of jack of all trades but master of none. But God did.
     We don't know whether our circumstances today are actually good or bad. We know they might hurt at the time, or feel good at the time, but we don't know if they're actually just preparing us or helping us for something down the road which we can't see.