Two Week Notice

Some­times employ­ers get a two week notice, some­times it is employ­ees. It is like the two minute warn­ing in foot­ball. The game is almost over. Do what­ever you are going to do to either win at the last sec­ond, or lose with a sense of fair play and dig­nity. “I quit!” and “You’re fired!” carry about the same con­se­quences. Some­thing is com­ing to an end.

The cur­rent econ­omy is see­ing a lot of both. Right now, it is two weeks before school starts (in most places). Stu­dents and teach­ers are being “fired” from the sum­mer pace. For some it is a curse, for oth­ers it is a bless­ing (some sum­mer jobs are really horrible).

Matthew 24 is when Jesus told the Jew­ish nation that they were fired. Yes, the Mes­siah came through them. No, their rejec­tion of the Mes­siah would not do. Not all fir­ings are as bloody as the Destruc­tion of Jerusalem — they just feel that way.

Peo­ple are sel­dom fired these days. Their posi­tions are “dis­con­tin­ued” (a way around the legal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of out­right fir­ing peo­ple). Peo­ple get early retire­ments. Their jobs get moved half way around the world. They wake up to a whole new set of circumstances.

I once read read that dying is God’s way of say­ing, “You’re fired!” As com­i­cal as that seems, it is based in some of Jesus’ para­bles (espe­cially the one about the man that tore down his barns to build big­ger barns). The end of the world is when every­one is fired from this life. (When it hap­pens, it will prob­a­bly be on a Monday.)

Politi­cians get voted out of office, while oth­ers are voted into office. There is an upside and a down­side to every­thing (Eccle­si­astes is great on this one). There are begin­nings and end­ings. In Christ, there are all sorts of plays on this. Bap­tism is both an end and a begin­ning. Res­ur­rec­tion is the begin­ning that began at the end. Dying to self means being born of the spirit. Being fired as a Pagan to be a Chris­t­ian is a pretty good deal.

I have often heard peo­ple say that being fired from some job was the best thing that ever hap­pened to them. It opened up new hori­zons and got them out of some sort of secure rut. It pushed them for­ward in life. And as the old say­ing goes, “What the cater­pil­lar calls the end of the world, the but­ter­fly calls being born.”