Psalm 37:5-6 Commit your Way to the Lord

I worked 41 years in the healthcare supply chain field, working my way through various job titles and responsibilities, only changing employers when our hospital was bought out by the local university. In April of 1979 I applied for a job in a hospital storeroom, unloading trucks, stocking the shelves, managing the inventory, and pulling orders for hospital departments. I gained a broad and comprehensive knowledge of healthcare supply chain by shifting through job responsibilities and titles over the course of four decades plus a year.

That sort of career is rare in an age where most people switch companies every few years. To my mind, committing my way to the success of my employers was the road to job security. Continually proving my value to the company and to my bosses, and I would ride that loyalty all the way to retirement.

That's how it's supposed to work, isn't it? I can trust them to be as loyal to me as I've been to them, can't I?

Then came 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit the university hard, like it did nearly every company in America. Thousands were furloughed and hundreds were laid off, and I was one of the second hundred who lost our jobs, three years short of the best time for me to finish with full retirement rewards.

That's not how it's supposed to work.

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: 

He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, 

your vindication like the noonday sun. 

Psalm 37:5-6

During the two-weeks notice they allowed, I was asked to work with my co-workers and bosses to let them know how to do everything I do in my job. They also needed me to bequeath to them my 41 years of institutional knowledge and experience.

As the scope of my tasks and experience began to dawn on them, I felt a certain amount of vindication. It was becoming clear there would be no way everything was going to get done by the people left behind. The people left to fill in the gaps weren't at fault, they just didn't have enough hours in each day or week to do it all. Nor did they have enough years on the job to have learned everything they might need to know.

There was some selfish pride in that vindication, but it was less like the noonday sun and more like the setting sun, as I stared ahead into an uncertain future.

I could lash out at the people who made the choices that have left me in this tough situation. I could fret about the injustice, I could envy those who somehow were spared. I could take the advice of Job's wife and rail at God.

Indeed, the weight of this unexpected betrayal threatened to take my wife and I under, bringing many tears and plenty of stress. But it hasn't crushed us, because my career has never been the primary commitment in my life. I've always been the type who works in order to be able to do the other things that are important to me, rather than being motivated by the job itself.

Our commitment has always been to the path the Lord lays out before us. I've survived multiple rounds of layoffs over these past 41 years. Each time, I said that if God has a new plan for me, some new thing he needs us to commit ourselves to, the best way for him to make that clear would be to pull my current career out from under me.

This is not the first time we've learned it's possible to be thoroughly crushed and mightily depressed about our circumstances, while at the same time feeling joyful to know the Lord is unmistakably at work in our lives. 

We don't know what the Lord has planned, but we are absolutely certain He will make our righteous reward shine like the dawn, our vindication like the noonday sun.