Flood

If you've spent any time in a church or in the Christian corners of the internet in the last decade or two, you've probably heard this modern day parable - the one where a man faced with his neighborhood flooding prays for God to save him, picturing the hand of God literally plucking him up and setting him down on safer ground. A truck, a boat, and a helicopter all stop by as the flood waters gradually rise, their drivers offering the man rescue, but he rejects each one as he continues to pray for God to save him - only to eventually die in the flood waters. The man arrives in heaven and asks God why He didn't rescue the man. God responds that He sent a truck, a boat, and a helicopter and wonders why the man didn't accept help any of the three times that He sent it.

On Friday I wrapped up my fifth week of working in a notably short-staffed department. There have been hills and valleys along the way, but this marked the first time that I didn't spend a notable chunk of at least one day in tears. Everyone is spread thin, and the stress is starting to wear on peoples' patience once more. Some initial conflicts have settled, others have reemerged, and new ones have arrived. We're all tired but soldiering on - because that's what we do. We figure it out in the hard times, even when the work looks and feels impossible.

My primary customer has regular conference orders on a near-weekly basis through most of the school year (with a break around Christmas and New Year's); 2-3 pallets stacked high with boxes of product go out for each one. We're in the last really big push with five such conference orders shipping out in the coming week before it trickles down to no more than two per week through the rest of the season. Due to needing to deal with a conference-prep project in between the last set of conference orders and my current one, I got started on this larger set of orders later than I'd usually prefer, and while the in-between project is paying its dividends now, it means that I'm also deep into crunch time. At times when I'm responsible for both regular orders and conference orders on my own, it generally takes me about two days to finish each conference - which means that past history very strongly suggests that by the time I started I wasn't going to have enough time to get everything done without getting help, particularly help from co-workers who are familiar with the new procedure we implemented for my customer's conference orders this winter. But facing the seemingly impossible, I breathed deeply, found hope in the knowledge that staffing was starting to look like it might return closer to normal (we even had a department supervisor in the building for a couple of days to start the week!), and fully believed that if I had patience, help would be on the way.

And then I saw how the week's regular orders across the department were panning out to be larger than usual. I kept breathing - help was going to have to come eventually, even if I had to wait a bit longer. But then I made the mistake of looking at our department PTO calendar after our supervisor updated it - and as I scanned the upcoming days, noting how many people planned to take days off (all very understandably so), I suddenly realized the strong likelihood that help wasn't coming, at least not anywhere near the levels that it had assisted me in all my previous busy conference weeks this year. There just weren't going to be enough people to go around. And that's when the panic set in. Not in the outward falling apart way that I so typically experience. In the go numb and attempt to function with a brain that's forgotten how to think straight kind of way.

"I lift my eyes up to the hills - where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth." ~ Psalm 121: 1-2

That verse has been in my heart and mind on and off for the last few weeks (mostly to the tune that accompanies it in Casting Crowns' "Praise You In This Storm" because what would my days be without some song or another constantly running through my head?). Those verses combined in my head with the recent continual reminders from a friend that it is so easy to look to earthly things - self, others, that extra serving of caffeine, etc. - for solutions to our problems when our eyes are meant to be fixed on Christ. So when faced with the reality that human help was unlikely to show up in the ways I had expected it to? I paused. I breathed. I prayed to have faith in the help that God sends, whatever form that was going to take. Which isn't to say that it wasn't a battle. Because despite the faith that my co-workers continually express that they have in me, I often find them to be entirely delusional (because my mind lives on recognizing patterns - and past patterns suggested that what I had left in me was not going to be enough).

When I was first about to hit a particularly busy stretch last Fall or Winter (I don't quite remember which), a very wise brother in Christ advised me and my then still fairly new co-worker to pick out some Bible verses that we found encouraging and use our creative talents to find ways to use those verses to decorate our work area. The me of that time had to work hard to control the urge to roll my eyes at him because, unlike so many experiences I'd had in the past where Bible verses had been weaponized against me by Christians who feared sitting with me in the pain of troubled times, his advice came from an authentic and caring heart - my hardened heart just wasn't ready to listen yet, and I blew him off. But during this current time of trial? I'd just purchased a pack of blank notecards along with fresh sets of colored pencils and permanent markers to finally start adding to my workspace some visual reminders of the Bible verses that had been on my heart. Awaiting a magnet order from Amazon, I'd initially waited to put anything up, but facing what felt like the impossible, I rearranged some other magnets we had hanging around to first add those verses from Psalm 121 below the verse that my now not-so-new co-worker first displayed on what I've begun considering our Bible verse post.

The Bible Verse Post

Sometimes you have to make up your own art therapy project.

On Thursday I received news that there was another conference order added to my load for the same pick-up date as the original set of five. Where I've generally kept track of which conferences are happening when, this one had been completely off of everyone's radar. An order for a more specialized conference, it at least was notably smaller than the rest, but it was still one more thing when I was running tight on time. So I breathed. And grabbed a couple of my co-worker friends to use our afternoon break to take the walking lap around the building that had come up in conversation just earlier that day (an activity I had never before considered doing and as such the timing of that earlier conversation became a lovely reminder that God's timing is perfect). And then for what remained of that afternoon, I continually looked to that Psalm 121 notecard while praying for that peace that surpasses all understanding that a younger me had sung about in Sunday School and AWANA as a child.

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." ~ Philippians 4:6-7

I've spent a lot of years absolutely hating those verses. Years when I searched for peace and hope in Christ and still felt nothingness at best and painful despair at worst, eventually feeling like a defective Christian. But I've also had a few tastes of that inner peace in the midst of chaos and trial that shouldn't exist and yet does anyway - including in the past month of work craziness - so I rearranged the magnets again and added another verse to my post. And I worked to make it through the days as best as I could, watching my suspicions come to life as my co-workers continually expressed their desire to come help me out but just as continually got understandably pulled in other directions toward the needs of what had to be done that day rather than building toward the needs of what had to be done in the coming week. So I soldiered on, accepting more and more the likelihood that I'd need to come in on the weekend to prevent longer-than-manageable hours that would otherwise be needed on the final work days leading up to the conference orders' shipping date (even more than the daily overtime I've been working for a few weeks now). We do what we have to do to get the things done in tough times. And I prayed for the strength to come in on my day off and put in some extra hours of good-quality work.

Then God sent a truck to my flood. I was wrapping up a task when my Friday morning break time rolled around. As I finished working, the first of my morning break friends showed up - the 19-year-old co-worker who I'd worked hard to teach to actually take her breaks rather than skipping them (meanwhile skipping my own because do as I say, not as I do) - and she reprimanded me for continuing to work a minute past our established break time. I brushed it off as I was indeed planning to take my break and was partially just waiting for the third of our break trio to arrive. But I was humbled nonetheless.

The stress of the day continued to rise like slowly boiling frogs so that they don't notice the temperature rising. We were confronted with the puzzle of product for a conference that didn't make it to its destination (though it was also no longer in any logical place in the warehouse), a major error in my eyes though one that our account manager managed to handle with peace and grace - at least outwardly - with words of encouragement and faith that God had a plan in all this. But by way of my own records I looked back at where my brain had been the days that I worked on that conference, and I knew that it was struggling enough on those days to be plenty fallible. I worried of any errors I had made since then as the toll of working short-staffed continued to grow. But I breathed and prayed for strength and a clear mind, and I kept working.

Then God sent a boat. Talking with a work friend during our afternoon break, she followed up sharing her plans for the weekend with a pause and then the statements "I don't think you need to come in tomorrow to work on the conference orders. I know it seems like there's a lot. I just really don't want you to have to take all of this on all on your own." I shrugged, said I'd make it work and I'd be okay, that my dad (who works at the same company as me) had already volunteered to come along and watch movies in the office so that I'd have someone else around from a safety standpoint. She said we could check in with our account manager to see what he thought based on where our current progress was at, and conversation moved on from there. I don't really remember about what. My head was too busy swimming with the unexpectedness of her words. I mean, it shouldn't have surprised me. She's the same one who'd prayed that I'd get sleep going into the weekend that I instead re-discovered writing. And she was right about checking in with our account manager before making my final call. At that point the thought of prayer was lost as I waffled between knowing how much work there was to be done, knowing how thin we were going to be spread, knowing already that my regular orders for Monday were back to more normal levels after a week of mostly light orders, and questioning my work quality after the midday missing product debacle. But I continued focusing in on the task at hand, double-checking everything even more than usual to try to keep any worry of fatigue errors at bay.

The next time our account manager stopped through on the production floor, I asked him how he was feeling with where our progress on the conference orders was at. He said that he felt pretty good, that he saw a pathway for us to finish on time - though it would take extra focus and hard work once we got to next week. He shared his hope that, if at all possible, everyone take the weekend to rest after what had been a really long, draining week for us all. And he absolutely didn't want anyone staying past our current standard departure time that Friday, that we should go home and rest. But he threw in an addendum that if I was going to be dysfunctionally anxious and unable to rest all weekend because I was worried about getting things done (okay, so his words were technically "curled up on the floor in the fetal position" which, because he's very aware of my past history, was admittedly fair), that he'd accept my coming in to work for a bit on Saturday. As if right on cue, my younger cohort arrived to offer some end-of-day help, and our account manager shared with her the same about wanting us to rest but not wanting us to spend the weekend anxious about getting the conferences done. Let me tell you, being stared down twice in a day by the co-worker who's nearly half your age is an extra-humbling experience. No words were required; the "Are you listening to him about not stressing out and not working too hard?" was plastered all over her face. Y'all, God sent a helicopter with a full news crew and then still made me make the decision about whether I was going to accept His unexpected version of help. (It's possible that I'm very much in a "I see what you're doing, and I understand and accept it, but I don't like you very much right now" phase with God at the moment...)

I set a progress goal to be my checkpoint of whether or not I was coming in on Saturday, and armed with both friends to help for most of the rest of the afternoon, I thought we had a fighting chance. But it wasn't to be. And as we worked, I became more and more aware of my brain's fatigue. A complete failure at sarcasm was the next sign (at least it was an easily-fixable one). And when we came up short on yet another product and I worried that I had accidentally grabbed a wrong box on the conference order I'd packed the day before (because I'd actually nearly done so multiple times that day), I came to accept that if I couldn't trust my brain anymore, I probably needed the rest more than the extra work time. So as the work day came to a close, I wrapped up what I could and literally shoved the rest to a space where it could wait until Monday. It wasn't until the tears hit the instant I exited the building to head home that I realized just how exhausted I was, that I realized how much of a toll the week had taken on me (not just from a work standpoint but from a life standpoint because brain unpuzzling doesn't put itself on hold when work gets busy, but more on that another day). And I realized how much I needed the rest.

I mostly crashed on Friday night. Spent Saturday writing, jumping between my quickly-filling journal and a handful of in-progress blog posts. Trying to process the work stress and the people stress and the people confusion of the week. Spent Sunday driving to one of my favorite places so I could walk the few miles to my favorite bench so that I could sit, and think, and write, and cry, and pray, and listen. And somehow through that all I found rest and peace going into what feels like an impossible week.

Blog editing on my favorite bench.

I still don't know how all of the work is going to get done by its due date. I look at the time, and the daily work on our plates, and the number of people who are scheduled to be out. I literally don't know how there will be enough time and man power to finish. There have been so many moments lately when I've told my stressed co-workers that things will get done, they all ways do, we always figure out a way - and this might be the first time I don't know how to believe it. But if God's response to my asking for strength and help and focus as I work through my last really big set of conference orders for the season was to send me three very trusted people to say "You need to rest," I'm trying to have faith that the time spent resting was at least part of what was needed, and He'll continue to send the help necessary as I dive back into the flood of work this week.