Humbling Grace

I've been very quiet lately because I've been working at the new job. It's been four weeks, and it's been a very humbling experience.

It's hard to be the new person anywhere. It's hard to be the oldest person in the group. I remember being the youngest and then, for a long time, being one of the pack, most of us almost exactly the same age. Now I'm the oldest, and I just turned 54.

It's a tremendous transition and a tremendous amount to learn. I'm working in a wafer fab clean room again, something I said I'd never do. The noise level in the place is a source of stress all by itself. There is paging going on and alarms and much ambient noise. It's difficult to make out what is being said when someone is conveying vital information to you. I also have not worked in a clean room in 20 years, a fact I've been trying to hide. (They never asked. I didn't offer the information. I said I had worked in a clean room. I didn't say when was the last time.)

The inspection is the easiest for me. This is where my transferable skills come into play. What is difficult is trying to keep track of the numerous Excel spread sheets which are used for various reports. (It seems like there's an additional sheet every day, and then I lose track of what we did last week.) Difficult, too, is using Workstream, the antique tracking system which controls all the lot movement in the wafer fab. It's one of those programs leftover from the days when all computer systems were caps only, so it looks like it's screaming at you. It's difficult to pick out the information I'm looking for from the display. There are so many commands to learn and the proper times to use them. In my position, a bridge between the tool operators and the engineers, I'm supposed to be able to do everything and have access to everything. I have the power to do many things (I can hold any lot at any time for anything) and I have to learn how to use it without creating havoc.

Some days I just feel stupid. I lost a day to illness this week, and when I came back after three days off, it was like it was a whole different job. There was a new crisis to be solved, and suddenly all efforts were being put towards that and the things I was feeling confident about before weren't applicable.

It's a different industry than I've worked in before, and things are different, so I am still feeling my way around that. Mistakes are inevitable, and there are times I can feel that I am trying the patience of the (very) young woman who is training me. I feel old and slow and useless some times.

Every morning I pray to learn this job and to do it in a way that brings Christ to the work place. I pray that he can use what I'm doing for the glory of his kingdom.

I don't know the people there yet, either. The weekend tech called yesterday to say he would not be in because his young son (a toddler) is in the hospital with a high fever. I felt bad for him because I had cousins who had a child who suffered brain damage from a high fever -- I know how dangerous this can be. I didn't know if it was okay to say I would pray for him, so I kept quiet and am praying for the health of his child without saying so.

I will likely fall silent for a while again after this. I have two more weeks and then I go on my night shift. I'm both looking forward to and dreading that. I'm looking forward to being better trained and working opposite my day shift counterpart so the work gets spread out more evenly and not so much overtime is required. Seeing the traffic going in that direction at that time of day, I'm dreading the drive in to work.

So I pray that God gets me through this and uses me to be a light in the darkness.

Praise Be to God, Alleluia!

I am giddy. It's not an emotion I experience very often, but this is a special occasion. I received a job offer today.

The interview that I went on that was such a fiasco is the one that resulted in the offer. While I've been a little anxious because I haven't worked since December and have been laid off since the third week of February, I know that it's been a reflection on the economy rather than on me. Since that time I've had exactly two interviews. On the first, I was told afterwards that I was the top candidate. Unfortunately, the position was eliminated. This job was the second interview.

I need to keep my fingers crossed (and my prayers aimed to heaven) despite all of this. Nothing has been signed yet, and even then, jobs can go away. Even when things are settled for me personally, there are still a lot of other people out there looking for work who need prayer. My prayer can now be that I can be a beacon of faith in my new workplace and that I do all I can to help others get jobs as well.

Lessons I'm Still Learning

When all of this is done, when I'm in the new job that God is preparing for me and when I have discerned where I am to serve him in my music ministry, I need to sit down and think of all the lessons I have learned.

At ProMatch, they say that interviews are to determine three things: if you can do the job, if you will do the job, and if they can stand you while you do the job. What you know seems to be less of a determining factor than attitude. More important is who you know and how you know them. Ultimately, our connections to other people are what is of most value.

Famous lines come to mind. Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, declared "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." John Lennon sang that he could "get by with a little help from my friends." And the Tin Man of Oz learned that the measure of a heart is not how much we love, but how much we are loved by others.

I have never been any good at staying in touch with people after our lives no longer intersect, but I'm willing to learn how. Through Facebook, I've connected with cousins I haven't seen in decades. Through LinkedIn, I've found old co-workers. I'm going to do a by-gone real networking thing-a-ma-bob and meet someone for lunch on Friday.

M is someone I was acquainted with at AMD. She was laid off years ago. I found her on LinkedIn and thought it might be nice to reconnect. When I last spoke with her on the phone, I got a rather negative vibe off of her. This concerns me a little bit because I feel that to move on with my life, I need to put aside negative feelings. When I see some of my former co-workers, all of us unceremoniously dumped by Spansion, some of them are still in a very unpositive state. Yes, a bad thing happened to us, but we need to move on. I don't want to be around that, the endless moaning and groaning. I don't want to be like that.

However, I feel led to reconnect with this woman. Maybe that was a little arbitrary bit of negativity and it's not how she is all the time. Or maybe she is sunk into a spiritual hole and needs contact with someone who has clawed her way out of the hole. God calls His people to be the light of the world, and we're not to keep our light under a bushel. That profits no one. And some of us (like me) have to realize that a light kept isolated from the rest is also of little use.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

As a member of the religious left, I do a fair amount of sitting on the fence. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but I generally see two sides of the big "Catholic" issues and am torn between. I consider myself both a faithful Catholic and a liberal to progressive politically.

Those who know me, know that I ride my bike as much as I can in nice weather. This saves me from having to turn on the radio in the car. (Yes, I know, I don't have to turn on the radio. I just do.) When I do turn on the radio, it's most frequently to Catholic Family Radio, which picks up a lot of the EWTN programming and some Ave Maria stuff.

I love about half of what I hear. I'm a big fan of Fr. John Corapi. I enjoy listening to (the repeat episodes of) Mother Angelica, even when I don't always agree with her. I like all the stuff about the Coming Home network and hearing about Byzantine Catholics ("Star of the East" at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings).

What drives me nuts is when I turn on the radio and it's all abortion, all the time. (Or, for a while, it was all Obama, all the time, and everything was negative.)

I agree that abortion is wrong. I agree that it is evil. But that doesn't mean that the women who choose it or the doctors who perform it are evil.

I think that the most common abortion method (I may be wrong on this) is the D&C, dilation and something that starts with a C. I've had one of those, and I've never been pregnant. About ten years ago, I was experiencing abnormally heavy flow -- after 3 weeks of my period, I called the doctor. She performed a D&C on me because it's basically a uterine biopsy, and she needed to make sure I did not have uterine cancer. (I did not, fortunately.) It makes me shudder to think that medical schools might hesitate to teach this technique to future OB-GYNs because it is an abortion method.

So I worry that knowledge which can be used for abortions will no longer be taught because doctors fear being attacked.

My father-in-law is a retired OB-GYN. People generally go into this specialty because they love babies, not because they like performing abortions. He used to write letters to the paper about his experiences in the days when abortion was illegal. Women would try to do it themselves (the infamous coat hanger) or go to a quack. He saw too many women die in the emergency room. Because abortion was illegal, they waited too late to go to the hospital.

The God I believe in can forgive anything. Better a live sinner than a dead one. Live sinners can repent and turn their lives around. If they've had safe, legal abortions, maybe they will have healthy children one day when they're ready.

I know, adoption is a preferable alternative to abortion. I agree totally. Yet I, in the flush of menopause, can comfortably sit back and say that, knowing that I do not have to worry about that ever again. I'm not a pregnant 15-year-old who had sex because she was pressured or thought it was the thing to do and is now too scared to talk to her parents.

And I can't be a hypocrite about this. If that had happened to me, I would have tried to get an abortion without my parents knowing. It's only by the grace of God that it didn't. I'm a big one for learning by other people's examples, and my oldest sister got pregnant before she was married. At least she was out of high school. She tried to self-abort and failed. (This was shortly before abortion became legal.) There was a shotgun wedding when my parents found out, and the marriage was a disaster. He abandoned her and, nine months pregnant and in labor, when they finally located him -- because in those days, you had to get the husband's permission to do a C-section -- he said he didn't want his wife to have a scar, so he refused. My father kicked up such a fuss, the doctor did it anyway.

All of the drama around this traumatized me so much (I was 12 or 13 at the time), that there was no way I was going to have sex as a teenager! But also, there was no way I was going to have a baby and be roped into a marriage I didn't want.

Abstinence is best for teens, I believe, but this is not how I would recommend it be taught.

So having observed at such a vulnerable age all the pain an unwanted pregnancy can cause, I am torn on abortion. No one should feel she needs an abortion. My sympathies are with the Right on how this is a sin and how women who find themselves pregnant should give the baby up for adoption. My sympathies are also with the Left on how little support there is for women who are pregnant and without financial resources and who shouldn't feel their best option is to submit to a backstreet butcher. I feel we spend too much time talking about abortion and not enough time about how to make a world where women don't feel it's their best option.

I have a job interview tomorrow, a prospect which fills me with equal parts joy and terror.

I've prepared as best I can. It's not quite in my field, but it uses many of the same tools and will have the same problems. I know I can do the job. It all depends on my competition and whether the company is willing to spend the time in letting me get up to speed on the job.

It's a good thing that when it comes to heaven, we have no competition. I don't have to fear that the Christian I'm praying beside will get to heaven and I won't because there was only the one opening in my area of expertise. God's love is infinite.

I have prepared for this the best I can. I have read up on the new industry. I have practiced my little stories that exhibit my soft skills (communication, team-building, etc.). Like the early Christians, I just have to trust that when it is time, the Holy Spirit will give me the words to say. On my own, I'm a babbling brook, stammering and grasping for words. With God, I can do anything.

Falling and Getting Up

We fall down, we get up,
We fall down, we get up,
And the saints are just the sinners
Who fall down and get up.
-- Kyle Mathews

This song from the contemporary Christian canon has great meaning for me. This is what God requires of us: when we fall down, we have to get up again. MotherTeresa said that we are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful.

This is how my job search goes as well. You have a bad patch and things get better. Then you have another bad patch, and then things get better. Repeat indefinitely. The lessons, as I see them, are not to give up and to use the time on the ground to make you more sensitive to your fellow fallen.

I have always been very bad at keeping in touch with people. I'm a hermit at heart and did not keep in contact with friends from high school or college. I've lost touch with former co-workers. In this Brave New World, that's a losing strategy, both for Christians and job seekers. Your network is your best chance of getting another job, and your network is your best chance of keeping your sanity and seeing Christ in one another. May God grant me the grace to not lose touch with my friends again.

Praying for Your Fellow Job Seekers

I sometimes wonder if this period of job hunting, which to me seems very long, is part of God's plan to open my eyes to other folks in need of prayer.

I went to a job fair last week. It was hideously crowded. I saw so many people I knew from my last job. While waiting in line, I indulged in some people watching. More than half the crowd (and we are talking hundreds of people vying for maybe a dozen positions) was dressed in interview clothes. I'm always a little shocked by people who come to these things wearing flip-flops and tube tops. I guess they're expecting a different type of event than I am. (And they were probably closer in their expectations since I did not actually get to talk to anyone regarding the position for which I was applying.)

Most of us had our game face on as well: bright and confident, trying to come off as the type of person you want working for you. But some had clearly given in to despair. Being overweight myself, I always notice the other folks who are heavy and how they are presenting themselves. One poor man looked like he had given up: slumped posture, rumpled clothing, tie askew. He looked like he'd already had a tough day at work, and maybe he had, but chances are that he, like me and my former co-workers, had been laid off months ago and had not yet found a position. I prayed for him.

After I had been seen (briefly) and delivered my resume, I stayed to talk to folks I knew. Again, while most of these folks were upbeat and putting on a good show, a few admitted that they were not doing well, so they, too, went on my prayer list.

I do not like being unemployed. I do not like the uncertainty it gives and the worry about the future if things do not pick up. But I think God has given me this time to notice His graces to me, increase my compassion for my fellow human beings, and draw closer to Him while praying that others draw close as well.