Bring the right job for him–and soon. Please.
I whisper the words alone in my car as I drive to my next meeting. I roll through traffic on Washington Avenue before I turn onto Portland. It isn’t the first time I’ve offered up a plea on behalf of one of my clients, and it sure won’t be the last—not even today.
My job as an employment consultant—my referrals coming from the county’s subsidized healthcare program—overflows with people’s pain. Addictions, evictions, suicidal ideation. Sleeping in cars, living in Section 8 housing, couch-hopping. Gunshot wounds, gastritis, diabetes. Torture, abuse, grief. Firings, felonies, fights. Prostitution, isolation, incarceration. The sinner was always sinned against first, you see. It’s just the way of it.
Life is hard, and the hard is long—always so very long. And my prayers don’t seem to shorten it.
Behold, the days are coming when the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.
The verse springs to mind, washing me in hope as I put the car into park. I pay the meter and walk into the shelter. As usual, I pass through the metal detector, but it’s easy now. The security guy knows me—not like the first time when he interrogated me. Since I’m “the job lady” (the name one of my people uses for me in her phone’s contacts), I notice a good employee, and I thank the security guard again today for being one.
I meet with my client, and I listen to her. Her life has been a hard long one, and she’s only thirty. But I’m proud of her; she punches down her demons each week to meet with me. Light and darkness fight over her soul every day, and here I am just trying to help her with her resume.
…the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed…
As I exit the building, I mull over the farmers in the prophecy. The planter of seeds precedes the harvester by four or five months, but the days are coming when they’ll bump into each other. In a future time of divine acceleration and abundance, they’ll till the soil and turn over fruit. In a split second, deaf ears will hear and blind eyes see. In a flash, hearts of stone will become hearts of flesh. And the same persistent hard we’ve always known will vanish.
I ask for quicker fruit for the woman I just left. Then my mind goes back to my earlier petition, and I raise it again.
Please. He can’t survive much longer. Bring me a good job lead for him or let him find something fast on his own.
My phone pings. A message from my coworker.
I found what looks like a possible job for your person. She sends me a link to apply. It’s perfect.
I smile and thank her, not missing the acceleration in this outcome. These aren’t heart matters, and mine are almost nothing stories—only a microcosm of what’s to come. But it is coming.
A second later, my phone chirps again. This time, it’s a text from him.
I got an interview today. Wish me luck.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.