Angel in the loft?
In 1994 I was struggling financially. I had returned to college in 1991 and completed my degree in psychology. I thought that with my varied experience and a college degree, employers would be eager to hire me. I was wrong.
I kept trying to find a job in the human service area but no one was interested. I wanted to be in a job that I helped people. At one point, in order to broaden my options, I did an informational interview with a sheltered workshop manager in a small town. At the end of the interview after I had told him the type of employment that I was seeking, he indicated a few places that I might try. As a parting comment, he mentioned that he might have something come up in a few months that paid about $13,000. a year if I thought I might be interested. I thanked him and asked him to let me know when it was available but I knew that I would not take a job paying that little. I had just given up a job paying $45,000. a year in order to return to school.
Well, I ended up taking that job and did quite well with it as far as the job duties were concerned, but I continued to go deeper and deeper in debt. The pay was just not enough to make it each month so I kept charging stuff on my credit cards and my credit card bills got higher and higher until I was a really stressed each month trying to pay my bills. In the personnel folder that came with the job, it stated that after a certain period of time you could ask for a raise. I knew that I was doing a great job at work so I thought I would probably get the raise. When the time came that I could ask for the raise, I one day pointed out what the personnel manual said to the manager and he said yes, it says you can ask but you won’t get it. It was at that point that I knew I had to try and find another job, one that would allow me to be able to pay my bills.
Long story short, I started looking for another job and after many, many applications, I did in fact find what I thought was a suitable job, working as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the state of NC. It immediately increased my salary by over $10,000.00 a year. But I was still struggling to pay my bills each month because of the credit card bills. So I decided to refinance my house. I went to my bank and applied for a loan so that I might pay off my credit cards. I used my new job as an income stream and my house as collateral. All of the paper work was completed but for some reason, my banker did not go ahead and process the loan. I would call for him at the bank and be informed that he was busy. Or I would call and discover that he was on vacation. Meanwhile, my stress levels continued to mount each day. I was at a loss at what to do to get him to go ahead and loan me the money.
One night, I was up in my loft, trying to sleep but unable to, because I could not stop worrying. I just kept going over and over in my mind the fact that I was probably going to be unable to make my minimum payment one day on one of my credit cards and my interest rate was going to soar and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I’d probably lose my house and have to go bankrupt and on and on and on. Worry worry worry. Suddenly, I felt a bounce on my bed like someone had sat down on it. I opened my eyes, and there, to my astonishment, sat a lady. She was sitting on the left side of the bed in a yoga position, with her legs crossed and her hands resting on her thighs, facing away from me. Her back was to my hip as I lay in bed on my back. At the time, the way my bed was positioned, you could not get around to the left side of the bed because it was pushed up against the wall. If anyone was to occupy that side of the bed you had to crawl across from my side or come in from the foot of the bed. Well, my mouth was open in astonishment and she just looked at me and smiled and reached over with her left hand and placed it on my forehead. When she did, all of the worry was wiped out of my mind. I knew I had been thinking hard about something but I couldn’t for the life of me, remember what it was. After unsuccessfully trying to recall what I had been thinking about, it suddenly occurred to me (being a guy and after all that is our job) that her presence in my bed might lead to other pleasant benefits, at which point she smiled at me, bent down and kissed me lightly on the lips, and disappeared. I know a lot of people will think I was dreaming, but to me it was as real as any other experience I have had in this dimension.
My loan did finally go through and I was able to pay off my credit cards and start living without so much stress.