The Pageless Book

Photo Above by Danielle Blue. Photo Below by Wired Protocol.

I come from a lower middle-class family with two blue-collar working parents. When my mother had first met my step-father, he was a union steel worker, which was at the time a secure job you could count on until retirement. Someone forgot to tell the company owners that, because throughout my childhood our family suffered temporary lay-offs which lead to unpaid bills and eventual eviction notices. I don’t blame my parents; they were raised in an industrial society and were unprepared for the shift to a technological white-collar based economy.

In time, the temporary lay-offs stretched from weeks into months, until one day they closed down the plant at which my step-father worked. This event sent my parents into a panic. I remember long nights of listening to them argue about money, bills, and blaming each other for how bad things had gotten. At some point, I became tired of worrying and fearing the next crisis. Had we not survived these issues before? My parents had always seemed to pull their resources and their wits together at the last minute, finding a means for us to survive as a family. I began to see all the arguing and worrying as a waste of time and energy that could have been better spent resolving or even preventing my family’s financial problems. We would always survive; the question became how well we would survive.

In stark contrast to my parents, I had developed hope for the future. Now this wasn’t a naive hope - after all we had been through, I learned that hard times are always a pink slip away. However, times would not always be hard, and every passing moment of in-fighting was another lost opportunity to make the hard times a little less hard. Why waste that energy and time?

So, when my wife came home early from work seven months ago and told me with a stunned look on her face that she had been let go, I didn’t panic. I knew that we would make this work - no stressing needed. I was pretty confident that she would have a new job within the next couple of months. Even though I was wrong, and we have struggled through these last seven months, I knew that we would survive. There was no question in my mind that this was a temporary situation.

On Saturday, my wife visited me on my lunch break at work and told me that she had an interview with a local company. This company she was referring to has a great reputation, and she is looking forward to working for them. After such a long period of shrinking prospects and temporary positions, we may finally be looking at the opportunity for which we’ve been waiting. The hard times are almost over. Do you know what? They weren’t all that hard after all.

What does this have to do with spirituality? It shows that hope does win out in the end. These financial issues that I have witnessed in the past and am living with in the present are a microcosm of the ills in this world. Faith - that which is at the very heart of spirituality - does not need to be blind, deaf, or dumb to our present situation to be maintained. Not once when I expressed hope for the future did I ignore the truth of the present, and I am aware, even now, that this new opportunity isn’t guaranteed. However, it is the message of spirituality that, no matter how horrible things become, we have the capacity to survive, adapt, and even thrive. It is what experience has taught me and what history proves. Even in our worst hour, we have been living off the fruits of Hope.

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written by John \\ tags: Faith, Family, Life, Spirituality, Work