Broken

The last time I blogged, I was writing about a conversation I had at the plasma center about brokenness. That led me to believe that I should write about the things that have been breaking me in the past year or so. I'm sure it will be difficult to write, but it should also be worth it.

I would say that all of this started happening in October 2009. Looking back, this makes sense because these things started happening when I moved to Virginia from Kentucky. Living in Kentucky was probably the most spiritually transforming year of my life and I didn't take the time to be aware of the possibility of spiritual attack when I moved from there. I was aware of the fact that I'd be depressed and I'd miss Kentucky, but I didn't think about being vulnerable to spiritual warfare.

I moved to Virginia with the intent of living near Jeff and Emily and becoming a professional foster parent. In order to become a foster parent, I needed to earn more money than I owed, then I needed to quit that job once they had matched me with a child. I took on a full-time babysitting job in Yorktown (45 minutes away) in order to meet the income requirement. I was upfront with the family about what I was doing and told them I'd give them 1 month's notice once I was matched with a child. I went to the foster parent trainings for about 2 weeks and realized that I wasn't in the right state of mind to start caring for a child with severe emotional disturbance. I was a wreck because of leaving Kentucky and didn't think it would be the right time to start taking care of a kid like that.

I quit the foster parent classes and started looking for a "real" job. I found one as a supervisor at a place for adults with disabilities. I had a very bad feeling about that job because it was very similar to the supervisory position at my first job at Project Independence. I had always refused to take that particular job because I knew how stressful it was, but here I was in Virginia and thinking it would be different from the one in California. I quit the babysitting job to take that one, which made the mom mad at me for only giving two weeks' notice. She kept saying that she was going to send my check for the last week of employment in the mail, but that never happened.

My gut feeling about the "real" job was accurate and I was completely miserable because my gifts don't lie in administrative or supervisory tasks. The straw that broke the camel's back was when some morphine was missing from one of the ladies who was receiving hospice care. We all suspected that one particular employee had taken it, but there wasn't enough proof that it was her.

I also got a reckless driving ticket on my way back to Kentucky for Thanksgiving. I didn't know how bad that was until I called my mom and she told me, "You could have been arrested for that." Two months later, I went to court in Lexington, VA (3 1/2 hours away) and was charged with reckless driving, which is a misdemeanor. I got home that night to a note on my door from my landlord stating that the Directv dish wasn't allowed to be attached to my apartment building. This was also the month that my car radio and my sister's laptop had broken (it got a virus while I was borrowing it), so I felt like losing TV was going to put me into a bubble. I sat on the couch, cried for a half hour about everything breaking, felt all alone in the world, and also felt very aware of God's presence.

They weren't able to find a new place for the Directv dish and they told me that I owed them $440. This was because it had been installed and it was the remaining balance on my 2 year contract. I lost it again because I didn't have $440 to throw around on TV that I wasn't getting. I went back and forth with them a few times and was put on hold a lot. They finally reversed the charge when they found they hadn't had written permission from my landlord to install it in the first place.

Soon after that ordeal, I got up the nerve to quit my job. I felt terrible about it, but I knew it was better to quit soon after realizing I wasn't cut out for the job. I had no idea about what I was going to do, but was actually able to trust that God would provide the right job (something I should have done the first time around). Everything in my life was a gigantic question mark and I was lonely, depressed, miserable, etc.. I had never felt so alone and hopeless before, so all I really wanted was to sleep or be in heaven with Jesus. I knew that I needed help, but was so far gone at that point that I didn't have the strength or the energy to look for counseling.

Instead, I ended up talking on the phone every other night with a guy who had e-mailed me on eharmony and having long conversations with him. I was excited at the time because I had never talked that long on the phone with anyone and I thought this could be something different. For the first time, I chose not to analyze this guy that I was interested in because there didn't seem to be any red flags. He loved Jesus, had a job as a student ministries pastor, loved his family, was living where he'd settle down, and eharmony said we were compatible... what else did I need to worry about?

He ended up dumping me in order to pursue a girl who was 9 years younger and had a boyfriend. Said dumping occurred after I had gone grocery shopping with him that night at Walmart and watched the Dallas Mavericks game with him... in his house... 45 minutes away from my house... 10 hours before I was going to interview for any special education teaching job. I tossed and turned all night with the thoughts, "I'm so mad, I'm so angry... I HATE DALLAS!" repeating in my head. I kept thinking about how I needed to get some sleep because my interview was hours away, but sleep never came. I tried to eat something for breakfast, but the only thing that sounded good was Jell-o. I went to the interview after being up for 25 hours and with pretty much no food in my stomach. It lasted for about an hour, but I didn't feel great about how it went. Especially because I had to ask them to repeat a few questions when I couldn't grasp them or answer well on the first try.

I got the rejection letter from them a few weeks ago and it's official that I didn't get to go back to teaching this fall. I'm okay with this because I love doing ABA therapy and didn't really want to quit working at B.E.S.T.. I just thought that teaching was going to be an option when September came around.

Since my hours at B.E.S.T. have fluctuated so much, I've been taking on babysitting jobs to make ends meet. I've been on sittercity.com and have gotten to babysit for quite a few nice families. One of the moms had requested a background check for me (she did this for everyone and it had been almost 1 year since my last one). It came back with 2 case numbers from Orange County and said, "Charges: Not Provided." Sittercity sent out an e-mail to every person who had contacted me or saved my information that said something like, "do not contact this person because they have violated our terms of use," and then kicked me off their website.

I looked up the case numbers and they were from my brake lights being out- once in 2004 and once in 2007. I disputed the claim because my brake lights being out shouldn't affect my ability to work with children. They figured out they were wrong and allowed me back on the website. Of course, they didn't send out an e-mail to tell everyone that my background check had cleared. They just put my profile back up as if nothing had happened.

Then, in the past 2 weeks, I backed into a car in a mini mall and I got a speeding ticket. The speeding ticket led to him telling me that I need to register my car in Virginia. This would be fine, except for the fact that my car has been on the brink of death recently and has to be inspected in order to be registered. I'm sure they're going to have a laundry list of repairs when I take it in :(.

Those are the random, bad things that have happened in my life since last year. They keep happening and probably won't stop until I'm broken again. The lessons I've learned through all of them, though, are that God takes care of me and He's allowed these things to happen for a reason.