house of blair

So, I was laid off last week.

Well, maybe it wasn’t so much as a “laying off” as a “wandering off”. That is, my job wandered off to Arizona and I (and about 20 others) found ourselves loosely coupled to our former jobs. Good bye, sweet paycheck. The (very) good news is that we’re all still employed until mid-July, which should be plenty of time to locate a new job.

Of course, everything has now changed. We pulled our offer on the house (no penalty because the bank had yet to accept the offer). We canceled the (badly needed) vacation that we would have had started late next week. We’re more than a little irritated with the thought of being stuck in Las Casitas a little longer.

Sigh. I was really looking forward to visiting Zion National Park and visiting my brother-in-law’s Chili farm in New Mexico.

I’m more than a little bummed about the whole thing. I was excited about working for Pearson Education. Though the education sector is a bit odd (based on my vast experience of 1 year), it was an industry that I enjoyed working in and for. I haven’t worked for any company longer than a few years and I thought that I would be with Pearson much longer than a few years. The irony is that this was one of the shortest gigs ever.

So please pray for us during this unexpected time of transition and change.

Schemann, p. 17:

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the “sacrament” of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

I’ve started to read Alexander Schmemann’s book “For the Life of the World.” It’s a borrowed book so I can’t write a bunch of notes in it - so I’ll blog instead. Here he notes that despite our widespread tendency to view everything in terms of utility, we can’t help but feel a meal is ever merely just that - a meal.

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite — the last “natural sacrament” of family and friendship, of life that is more than “eating” and “drinking.” To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life. (The Life of the World, p. 16)