The voice of God:

I used to a useful man, a man with a purpose and a future and then I lost my job. Now I live at home with my poor parents and so for me the loss of my job was not some terrible financial loss, I had no dependents to look after so there was only the very minor guilt of living off my parents and so I was content to search for job after job.

I am a very dour Methodist and thus have very low living cost but even I eventually drained my own savings and was forced to claim benefits, something I do with utterly no enthusiasm but needs be when the devil drives an all. I was set the utterly puerile task of look for just three jobs a week and decided to set myself the far harder task of 3 a day; Ironically all to no avail.

It was an agency I applied for ages ago that offered me a job, after one very short interview I was offered a new post. It was a dramatic step down in pay and responsibility but I have always believed a job was a job and I have always believed that you should work if you can. So knowing very little I took the post. Well to my shock it was a data entry position, something my dyslexia did not empower me to but I swore to do my best and to my small surprised I was passible at it, unfortunately I had managed to annoy my manger.

Now I am not a weak man, life has somewhat harden me and I can take allot of stuff but even I cannot take manager who highlights the smallest of errors and who responds to every enquiry with aggression. I concede I was not ideal for the position and certainly did not possesses the readymade skill they required but I tried my hardest, slowly increasing the pressure on myself, silly making myself quite ill in the processes. I would have quit but I knew that I would lose all rights to benefits for six months and thus it was with grateful release that thanks to my boss’s campaign of criticism I was let go.

Now I was sick in body and mind, I was suffering from high blood pressure and a deep depression brought on by the seemingly downward turn my life had taken. Of course I was only aware of the sickness which was very minor and really exacerbated by the secrete sickness. Once again I lived of what small earnings I had gathered in my time in purgatory until they ran out.

So once again I joined the roll call of the disposed and trust me, if you’ve never been in the temple of despair aka a job centre, you should get down on your knees and give thanks. Then salvation, I was invited for a first interview at a firm offering an ideal position where I could use and build upon my existing skills and I hope be happy and helpful there. At the first interview the enormity of the gap between the starting position and the one I would eventually achieve was explained to me. I was lucky enough to be invited for a second one.

So I woke early that morning, before my alarm, and convinced myself that I was wasting my time, that the test (a standard part of a technically oriented 2nd interview) would show I was unable to function and I would be humiliated. This was the voice of self-doubt and of the depression into which I had slipped. This was the voice of the devil or my own personal version. I read many years ago that the devil hides in those corners of the mind that we dear or cannot look and so there rested mine, ready to leap out as the opportunity arose.

Thankfully alongside the devil there spoke another voice, a stronger voice. A voice that spoke of my duty to endure and attend, as if I were humiliated it was my own fault for over stating my ability and a voice that spoke of safety and of love. A voice that rose above the calmer to affirm not that I would be successful but that I should go anyway. This was the voice of God. It seems a rather mundane thing for God to involve himself in but as someone said God is in the detail.

Sometimes we expect vast angels and choirs and burning bushes to guide are path, we especially expect ever greater wonders the darker are situation is but sometimes it is just a voice of confidence or of duty that is the voice of God, God maybe great but often his voice is but a whisper. Anyway beyond the theology I did after a series of disasters that would have level lesser men attend the interview and was offered the job. I cannot know what will become of me or of anyone who reads this piece. I can just reaffirm that God loves them all, that God is with them and that they should listen for that voice of God so often drowned out.