Short Story - A Second Chance - Grant Eagar

 

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I'm 63 years old and I have done a lot of stupid things. There are many things I wish I had a second chance to repeat. This is one chance I was given to have a do-over.

 It was the winter of 2010; I was finally let go at Boeing in Salt Lake City Utah. I had contracted there for three years. For a contractor, it was a good run. I started putting out resumes and got an offer to go work at Boeing in Philadelphia. There were local jobs at Hill Air Force Base that would take a few months and did not pay as well so I passed them up for a well-paying job out of state. I thought this would only be for a few months and I would find a job back in Utah. 

We were heavily in debt and felt like we did not have a choice. I ended up spending the better part of the next six years working away from home. The reason I did not bring the family with me was that we wanted to have stability and allow the kids to graduate from high school. We finally tried to sell our home and it would not sell. It was all well-meaning. The irony is that we ended up going bankrupt anyway so all the sacrifices were a waste. 

Looking back, I have kicked myself a hundred times. You either live by faith or you live by credit cards. I also felt I should have faced the situation with faith and either taken the family with me or stayed in Utah and found something local, even if it took a few months. Like they say hindsight is twenty-twenty. 

Fast forward to 2024, I've been laid off again. This is a chance to finally do it right. I hold my wife's hand when we pray and our prayer is that I can stay with the family and either find a job here in Las Cruces or be able to work remotely. Being unemployed is super stressful so at first, I was willing to take whatever I could get, but I remembered my promise to myself and when I prayed I felt the assurance this would happen. I quickly got a job offer out of town which made us feel much better, but I wondered if the impression I got was real. 

I decided to wait and after a month I got a job as a contractor working remotely for the company that had laid me off. I've found that for many of the things I wanted to redo, I ended up getting another chance. 

Unfortunately, sometimes I still make the same mistakes again. 😉