[I'm writing this for myself, to get these thoughts down "on paper." It will probably be long, so Caveat Emptor, so they say...]

Psalms 56:3

"What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee."

Thirty-three years ago, Charming took a job at Pizza Hut, training to be an assistant manager. He figured to work in a restaurant only long enough to figure out "what he wanted to do with the rest of his life."

Over the next nine years, we endured a number of bouts of unemployment. Back in the day, "standard practice" in the restaurant industry (Charming had also worked for four other companies) for a newly-hired district manager was to fire all the managers and begin again with people of his own choosing. In between times, Charming tried lots of "own your own business" things: Christian books, Amw*y (twice), carpet cleaning, insurance, business brokering. All commission-only, all miserable failures.

We learned the truth of Psalms 37:23-25:

"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in His way. 24Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholdeth him with His hand. 25I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread."

We have never gone without a meal.

Once we had a case of blue-box mac-and-cheese (24 boxes) to cover lunches and dinners until the time the first paycheck came for a new job.

Once we had pb&j sandwiches for a week, three meals a day, except for the last two days when there was no peanut butter, just jelly sandwiches.

We have been bored, but not hungry.

We also have not been unemployed since February 1984. That's when Charming took a job with W*ndy's, for whom he worked for 21 years. The last two years were extremely stressful. The day he was admitted to the hosptital with chest pains and his heart beating 150 times a minute, he got a call from Cr*cker B*rrel. The job looked promising for rapid advancement and good money.

The price has been high. The schedule is brutal, with some weeks having to rise at 3:45 am to open the store, some weeks getting home at 1 am when he had to "close," and some mid-shifts, where he misses seeing the kids for days at a time. Worst of all have been the weekends. At W*ndy's, except for the first eight months, he had weekends off. For 3 1/2 years, he has had only a handful of weekends off a year. Worse still, he only gets to go to church about once a month.

[Part II to follow...]

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