I have been freed my bondage. No longer will I deliver pizzas on the weekend. I gave my supervisor my two-week notice last weekend. She wrote on the calendar that I would work the next two weeks. I steeled myself for the next two weeks and continued my work. Yesterday, I stopped by the store to check the schedule and my boss told me that I was taken care of. When i asked for clarification, she informed me I was free. I simply needed to stop by in a week and pick up my last check. She also requested that I stop by from time to time to say hello.
This week’s events are a culmination of a year of praying. I started at Fielder Road in August of last year and for a few weeks I worked over 50 hours between both places. That forced me to cut back my hours to just Friday and Saturday at Pizza Hut. If it had not been for my financial situation, I would have left Pizza Hut then. As the months passed, I resigned myself to working both jobs. As this summer drew to a close, I began to look at my financial situation again. If I cut back in a few areas I could afford to work only one job. But I still debated it. I enjoyed the people I worked with. I also felt that I wanted to quit for only selfish reasons. Then the semester began, and I got a clearer understanding of the workload. With classes and work there was no time for homework let alone a social life. That is when the paradigm changed. Previously, I had wanted to quit for convenience and comfort. Now I needed to quit in order to fulfill my class requirements.
After I gave my boss the news, I began to have questions. “Was I doing the right thing?” “Am I leaving behind a ministry that God placed me in?” I knew I needed to quit but I could not shake those nagging questions. The questions continued until last Saturday night. My shift was drawing to a close and there was a plethora of jobs needing to be done: wash dishes, fold boxes, prepare chicken wings, cut pizzas, and answer the phone. I froze for a moment, attempting to make a decision. Each task was important and needed to be done, but I could only do one at a time. It was in that moment that the Lord gave me clarity and a peace about my decision.
Just as with all the tasks at Pizza Hut, I have many tasks that I can do and are all good. However, I can only do so many. Since I moved to Texas to go to seminary, that task ranks near the top. I have one job that can pay the bills and another that would have left me lacking financially. I chose the job that would not bankrupt me. This doesn’t mean that I won’t miss the people and the extra money, but sometimes life requires tough choices. And you can only juggle so many things before things get dropped.