The Insolence of Office

There are a couple different meanings which this line in Hamlet could take on. I'm going to play with it a little though, because I recently lost a potential job due to stupid people in high places making stupid decisions to which they themselves are immune and from the effects of which they are insulated.

It is a struggle for me in this life to determine the appropriate course of action. Too many variables in an increasingly larger web of relationships debilitates me to the extent that I become apathetic toward it all. Let's take the Boston Tea Party, for instance. Was this a justified course of action? Granted, there was oppression of taxation with the only cause being the greed of king George III. The British government was continuously placing more and more taxes upon the colonists until, fed up with it, they revolted.

This may seem to you, as it does to me, warranted, but I get stuck thinking of the Biblical implications of this action. Many of those who revolted in Colonial America called themselves Christians, Bible-believers, and yet (this is where it gets personal for me) God never promised a life of ease, and in fact when it came to taxation, He instructed, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesars." This is all fine and good so long as it doesn't affect me, but then it did.

I was offered a job and was to start that job this week. My financial woes were finally behind me and I was able to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Turns out I am in a cave and it was just some lightening bugs. You see, the business I was to begin working for just closed out its fiscal year and was in the process of going through books when it encountered a problem, more taxes. This company made less last year than it had in the past, but coincidentally owes an extra $20,000.00 in taxes. This $20,000.00 is the same that had been saved to put toward hiring another account representative. Thanks to the Federal Government however, it will now be spent to fund new schools for some senator's reprobate kid to go to because he is too special for public school.

This is the rub, the Federal government loves to impose taxes in the name of "Unemployment funds" or "Bailouts for businesses" or "Helping people buy a homes," but the reality is that if they continue to tax small businesses and citizens, there will be no more businesses to pay that unemployment fund or to employ people, nor will there be citizens gainfully employed to buy houses and pay for the business bailouts. It is a filthy cycle in which I find myself, currently, smack dab center.

So where does this cycle end. I am sure I don't have an answer for that, I am not a senator's son. What I do know is that I would have had a job were it not for heavier small business taxes this year. But I am not really here to complain, I am here to uplift, for in this reality there must be a silver, or more likely a golden, lining.

Looking back over prior posts this morning I happened upon a verse from Ecclesiastes, "When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other" (7:14). Now that's some hard stuff to swallow. There is a plan here, I know there is, I just don't know what it is just yet. I know my God and I know that he is a God of redemption, a God that saves the day! Whether it is the salvation of my soul, or the salvation of my apparent helplessness in life. The one thing I know is that someday, when this life is swept into the past and timelessness becomes reality, on that day when I look him in the face, I will forever forget these trivial problems and be swept away in the foreverness and infinity that is God, whether I know and understand or not.