Thursday, December 13, 2007

A job well done

Isn't it funny that job and Job are spelled the same way? It is indicative, I believe. Our ancestors weren't fools when it came to the Word.

I have just overhauled an entire 40 page publication in three weeks. the graphic design, the editorial design and content, even the ads layout. Everything is different than it was just three weeks ago.

I'm feeling very good about it.

Finally! I got to use this weird bag of skills that I've honed over the past umpteen years. Brand marketing. Editing. Writing. Design sense. I got to manage several graphic designers and rein in the overwritten descriptions of little programs that are simply supposed to be fun. I got to put into perspective a whole organization and actually make it LOOK more substantial and together than it ever has before.

I've been working countless hours, many, many more than I've been paid for, and I think it worked for the publication. Whether it will ever pay off for me, I guess, just doesn't matter all that much. I had a blast making a difference. I got to help someone believe in herself! I got to do something I'm good at. It is enough for now.

Tomorrow is another day. So, I also started looking at want ads again. Is it so wrong to know that I am worthy of being paid a survivable, and even abundant wage? I am worth a lot. I have so many talents in my back pocket that have hardly ever been utilized.

Just a few months ago, I wrote that I thought that I couldn't handle a big job. I've just proven myself wrong. I have so much energy for work when I'm giving my all. I know that absolutely to support my kids and make a stable future for us, I'm willing and even eager to take on much more than I ever have before. I just want to really utilize my skills fiinally. I don't want to be ho-hum if I'm working. I want to be totally thrilled, as I was these past three weeks, for the opportunity to shine. Even if it is hard. I want to be compensated really well for what I do really well, too, and I don't think it is too much to ask for.

The secret of going from job to Job is really to simply do your best even when you have to argue with yourself and your own resentments and attitudes, even when you have to forgive others and their resentments and attitudes, and even when others don't fully trust themselves and you have to trust them regardless. You have to do your best, and that is good enough. How good can you be?

Sunday, December 2, 2007

The Book of Job

I've been looking at this old Biblical tale and wondering about it. You could say I've been having a "Job-experience" in my life for quite sometime. I'd have to say it's been incremental, and not a before-and-after type of thing. For instance, for seven years at a time I was covered head to toe with hives. I went to countless doctors for a cure, and en masse they shrugged. Could this have been the work of Satan to test my faith? Then there was the years of abuse at the hands of the man I dearly loved. This led me without a doubt to deeper faith rather than away from it, but ultimately what I had faith would happen never did -- that he would finally love me enough not to hit me. What happend, of course, was that I finally changed and said, "enough."

Now my "Job-experience" is that I'm poorer than I've ever been since I was maybe 23 years old. Truly I'm starting over with just the advantage of experience that tells me that I have had abundance and maybe it will come again if I am competant. I no longer worry about being brilliant or special. The blessing of experience is knowing that competance is actually more important in the long-run.

I have two children, but only 1/2 way. 1/2 of the time they are away from me as if they were gone completely. It honestly causes me to cry on a daily basis not to have them in my life as they should be in my life. This is not what I had faith would come about. My challenge is to find the blessing somehow in it. This is my biggest struggle because I so want to protect them from the very life I brought them into!

Also, my boyfriend, a steady, gentle, kind and supportive man who helps me keep the faith in many ways, lives far away and travels for his job about 70% of the month. I see him when he can afford to come see me, but then I need his financial help, so he can't come see me as often. This I have to look at as some sort of opportunity, and when he is near to appreciate his presence one hundred percent.

I have read that this story of Job is about a self-righteous man becoming truly right. That is going from an external belief about God and what it means to be blessed, to an enlightened internal belief in God that understands that circumstances and appearances have nothing to do with the blessing of light and love. In a sense, happiness is a choice, and a moment. I see my life as a connect-a-dot affair. The dots are moments of happiness that I leap to with the choice to find them. They may boil down to a pleasant exchange at the grocery story, or a hug from my son, or the evolution of my daughter into a young lady. As I leap from moment of happiness and realization, I create the shape of my life.