Bookmarks – November – God Jobs

God Jobs

My husband calls them “God jobs.”

They’re those times when the Higher Power is clearly, unquestionably present.

Not that my Higher Power isn’t in complete control of my life all the time. (If only I believed that all the time.) But I’m talking about those amazing moments that have no other explanation—when the thing that is happening is clearly “meant to be.”

I witnessed this while chairing a recent home group meeting. I had decided to use In All Our Affairs, Making Crises Work for You (B-15) for the topic of responsibility and detachment. Heads nodded in agreement when I suggested the topic. We went around the room, each person reading a passage and sharing, or not. We moved from the introductory pages to the personal stories in Reflections on Responsibility and Detachment.

The section is titled “Members Share Experience, Strength, and Hope.” The second story, “Powerless Over Others’ Pain,” is about a mother who learns that her daughter was sexually abused and then blackmailed by her alcoholic stepfather.

The person who read that story comes every so often; she lives about 45 minutes away. As she was reading the story, I thought, Uh-oh, no one here is going to relate to this one.

How wrong I was!

“I needed to read this,” she told us. She shared that she is a counselor. One of her clients is a young woman who was being hospitalized after trying to kill herself. Our member (I’ll call her Joan) said she calls the young woman daily. “I want to help her,” she said. But she said she realized she can only do so much, that she cannot take away the young woman’s pain. Joan said she recognized that she needed to detach in a healthy way in order to take care of herself and continue to try to help the young woman.

Her sharing was profound for me. I was struck by how clearly Joan was meant to read that story and to share her story with us. It was a gift to us all. It was a God job.

I hope our Conference Approved Literature helps us to see the God jobs, great and small, in our lives.

Thanks for letting me share!