Saturday May 31, 2003

The mysterious workings of the Almighty

A couple of days ago I got an ecstatic voicemail from my a friend of mine, known to frequent readers of this blog (or rather, readers of this blog's comments) as Your Old Roomie. It went something like this:

Hey Drina, I just got a job at Cain park as a wardrobe mistress. I'll be working on a show there. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Just had to tell you. Talk to you later. Bye.

This is exactly the news that I've been waiting to hear.

I listened to the voicemail maybe three or four times, savoring the sound of joy in her voice. It was only a few short weeks before that my roomie and I shared a draining conversation in the wee hours of one emotional Saturday morning. She had just come home from her last night working as a wardrobe mistress for our school's theater department, a job she adored, with black streaks of watered-down mascara around her eyes.

After the show that night my roomie walked into our dorm room, sat in my chair, and let out all of her feelings in one long exhausting ramble... her sadness for having to leave the comfortable home and loving family she made at school; her regret for having followed an academic career in teaching which provided her only with uncertainty for the future; her fear for having no job, no health insurance, no security; and her dejection for having to give up her true love of working in theater.

I knew about a lot of this before that night. My roomie had leaked some of her fears and frustration over the course of the semester. She can't hide these things very well, so I had an idea about what was coming. But I sat there, listening to her, looking at her, completely caught off guard by the force of her emotions. I rambled some crappy advice back to her, hoping to hide my own uncertainty... something about moving onto bigger and better things. I don't remember what I said, only that I was full of it.

We rambled back and forth until we were too exhausted to even speak incoherently, and went to bed. That night I lay there thinking about my roomie, and about how only a week or two before then I was the same emotional mess. Scared, sad, freaked. No job. Nothing.

I was freaked, that is, until God pulled a favor.

In the midst of my end-of-college mess, I asked Him for a job. And I got it, without even having to work for it. Someone else fought for me during the hiring process, and won for me the position I now have. Can you believe that? And this one job was such a flawless fit; it gave me everything I wanted, everything I needed... A source of security. A source of income. A way to stay connected to the community that has sustained me over the last couple years.

So that night, after we had both given up on further rambling, I lay in bed and asked the Almighty for another favor, just like the one that cleaned up the mess in my own life. Divine favors are an amazing, mysterious thing. Only the Almighty could use one simple move to solve such a tangled, complicated mess. So I asked for another flawless fit, something that would give my roomie everything that she needed... A job. Some income. Something that she loved. Something that would make her happy.

My roomie got a new job, a temporary theater fix that has replaced her sadness and fear with hope and excitement. Such a small move, such amazing changes. I know who was at work behind this new job that my roomie has. The tone of the voicemail she left me gives it way.

What a difference one little favor can do.