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The summer of 2016 I ran into so many roadblocks financially! I had been working a temporary assignment that began in February and was supposed to become a permanent position. However, so much craziness occurred and the assignment ended after only three months, at the end of May.
Gift of groceries when I was sick. I had just run out of applesauce that I used for my breakfast muffin recipe at the time.
I was relieved to find another assignment only a few days later, though it was $2 less per hour. Then to my shock and despair, barely a month into the assignment, after coming home on a Friday, I received a call from the agency telling me I didn’t need to come back. No explanation as to what I had done or why the assignment ended, just that I didn’t need to come back.
Gift of ice cream – and possibly the best choco ice cream I’ve ever had!
I had only moved into my own apartment not even two months before the second assignment ended, and I didn’t know how I was going to make it. All that month of July I searched for work, for temporary assignments. I got a one and a half day assignment. I trekked to the library by bus in the heat of the July sun in Albuquerque, applying to jobs online because I couldn’t afford internet in my apartment.
Free ticket to see for King and Country
I prayed and praised and cried my eyes out. But it was also during that month that a friend took me to the Human Services department and helped me get signed up for assistance which I really needed, but had no idea how to access. I was approved for food and medical assistance that were so extraordinarily helpful in those troublesome times.
I have often looked back on that very, very difficult month where I got not only connected with assistance that helped me for many more months, but it’s also the point when Destinee and I connected to begin seriously discussing merging our then defunct blogs together.
Gift of coffee & creamer.
I did get a two-week work assignment at the end of July into the start of August through a temporary agency to help out a department in a local university. I was so desperately broke at the time. I’d really been broke before my last assignment ended unexpectedly and I’d gone weeks with almost no work. I had no idea how I was going to make rent and for the first time in many desperate moments since I moved to Albuquerque, I began to seriously doubt if I could make it here. I began to question if I would have to give up, turn around, return to Ohio and call my venture to New Mexico quits. I was so tired and exhausted emotionally. I was frightened and so very scared.
The new backpack that I’m still carrying years later.
The two week assignment was to help an administrative assistant get caught up with overflow work, like filing and new hire packets. This woman was a wonderful Christian woman. I don’t know what God said to her, but she was such a source of encouragement to me at a point when I felt so lost and broken in my understanding of what was going on in my life and where God was in my circumstances. Have any of you experienced somebody like that?
Gift of cash & encouragement.
She began to bring in gifts for me day after day after day. She provided me a wonderful new backpack when mine had gone kaput some months back. I was using a couple shoulder bags to carry my lunch, purse, whatever I needed for the day as I walked and rode public transportation. She had purchased the backpack for her middle school son, but it was too large for him.
It was also a laptop backpack and at the time I had just received my laptop as a gift from my father – another story of another blessing! I didn’t have internet in my apartment and had been carting my laptop awkwardly in bags not made to carry laptops to the library to work on job applications.
She also asked me what was my favorite flavor of creamer and she bought me good coffee with the biggest bottle of flavored creamer as well as some books by one of my favorite Christian authors.
Gift of Silk Almond Milk after I came home from being out of state for 10 days.
At the end of the two-week temporary office assignment the women I’d been helping, who I never actually told the details of my financial straits to, gave me an envelope with $200 that helped me make rent (this was not my pay for the work, but a personal gift she gave me).
Words can’t fully express how deeply this woman encouraged and helped me at the difficult point of my journey. I’m reminded of Elijah after he had the showdown with all the prophets of Baal, but the next day when the evil Jezebel threatened his life, he was so exhausted he told God he was ready to die. And God sent the angel to make him some food and have him get some rest.
Some parts of our journey we can become so worn out, so exhausted, some encouragement and help is what we desperately need to pick up and carry on.
There was also a friend who sent me a large portion of my rent. With the help of several friends and this relative stranger, I had enough to pay my rent with a late fee.
To read part five, click here!
The time I asked my friend if she would buy me toilet paper…and she bought me a whole lot extra.
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