When God closes doors

This is a true story, my story ...


I went home from work that night with a heavy heart. I had just lost my job as a subeditor with the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah where I had worked for the past six years. I was 62.

Losing my job at the twilight years of my life with an eight-year-old daughter and a wife to look after was surreal.

I didn’t expect the axe to fall too soon. The year before, I was named one of the company’s 12 outstanding employees and, despite the Saudi government’s program to gradually replace expatriates with Saudis, my job was not among the trades lined up for the chopping block.

It was one of the most trying times in my life. How do I fend for my family? We came to Saudi Arabia to escape a harsh life in Manila and the prospect of going home unprepared was a nightmare.

I got my termination notice without a warning in January 2005, two months before my renewable yearly work contract was to expire in March. I wanted to cry to high heavens that it was unjust. A few expatriates advised me to file a labor case but knowing the odds quite well, I deemed it prudent to keep still.

At that time, we were planning to migrate to New Zealand. My wife, a nurse 14 years younger than I, had barely started to scout for a job there. When I got my termination notice, I saw that dream collapsed. We had to use the money we saved for that purpose for more immediate needs.

Though shattered, I told my wife about the tragic news as calmly as I could. “Don’t be alarmed,” I opened up as she settled next to me on our sofa in the living room to watch TV, “I got fired from my job and we have to go home by the end of the month.”

I saw shock in her eyes. Instinctively, I assured her that I could still work as a subeditor in Manila and, with our modest savings, she could open a bigger store than what we used to have back home before I worked in Saudi Arabia.

My wife, who quit her job to take care of our daughter when the child was born in 1997, wasn’t convinced and pleaded with me to look for another job, any job, as a lifeline until we could move to New Zealand or any other Western country.

I understood her fears of going home. When I left Manila in 1999, I was a newspaper subeditor. We had a small store which we sat up in front of our home when she chose to stop working. When we got married in 1989, we never dreamt of working overseas until the spiraling prices of oil in the world market kept on pushing up Manila’s cost of living beyond our reach.

Figuring out our options when we went to bed that night, I decided to stay and look for another job. Filing a labor case was out of the question. That would hasten our going home. In Saudi Arabia, an expatriate can not simply hop from one job to another. He has to get the permission of his employer to move to another company. I asked my editor-in-chief to help me get a company clearance.

As I always do in my trying times, I prayed for divine guidance and was buoyed when the company gave me a six-month grace period to look for a new job. But it marked only the beginning of a new travail.

After failing to get a job with the Arab News, the only other English newspaper in Saudi Arabia, I discovered that I could hardly find even an ordinary office work. My wife, who also started scouting for work, did not fare any better either. My problem was my age; hers was an eight-year gap in her employment records.

Since my family joined me in Jeddah in 2000, we had been attending clandestine Bible studies and prayer meetings held by a Catholic charismatic group every Friday, the rest day in Saudi Arabia, and throughout our trial my wife would occasionally feel a muted anger against God for “abandoning” us.

As a former atheist, I told her it was futile to rebel against God. When I lost God during my college days after enrolling in an anthropology class that taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, I lost my peace of mind and had sank deeper into the quagmire of alcoholism until I turned back to Him on bended knees.

I told my wife that probably God was just testing our faith. We held on to faith. From my experiences, I had learned to practice the counsels in Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; never lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will show you the right path”

In June, as I grew more desperate after my applications for published job vacancies got no responses and the referrals of friends turned out fruitless, I got an unexpected call from a Filipino, a friend of our next-door neighbor, working in a construction company; He advised me to see another Filipino in a sister company, Truba Arabia.

I got interviewed and was asked to report to work as soon as I could wind up with my job at Saudi Gazette. God has endowed me with genes that made me look ten years younger than my age and I got lucky that the personnel manager who interviewed me did not bother to look into my curriculum vitae.

I was offered a clerical job that would pay a third less than my previous salary. I decided not to report to work at once on the pretext that the Gazette had asked me to stay for a while. I was hoping to find another job with a better pay. I did not find any.

By August, a month after my grace-period to look for a new job lapsed, the Gazette cut my pay by half. It was time to go. I rang up Francis, my Filipino contact at Truba Arabia but he told me that his boss had accepted a new applicant who was expected to report to work in the first week of August. My heart sunk.

What happened next was a series of strange coincidences I will never forget ever. In mid-August, I got an intuitive urge to give Francis another call, hoping for an unforeseen turn of event. The improbable happened. Francis told me his boss had a change of mind and was reconsidering hiring me if I would accept a lower pay. I bit the bullet.

I was happy but the euphoria did not last long. The day before I was to report for work, I called up Francis for a reconfirmation before I went home from the Gazette at five in the afternoon. I was dumbstruck to hear that his boss did not want to sign my contract anymore - for no reason at all.

My wife cried uncontrollably when I told her about it as soon as I got home. It turned out that she also failed to get a job she had applied for on the same day. We prayed for divine succor. I prayed to Jesus to touch the heart of Francis’ boss, whom I knew was still at the office at that time.

Like many other companies in Saudi Arabia, Truba Arabia had a long noon break and reopened at five in the afternoon up to eight at night. About 30 minutes after we said our prayers, my cell phone rang. It was Francis, telling me his boss signed my work contract at last.

My wife and I wept. We embraced and shed tears of joy. The next day, my wife called up a hospital where she applied for a job the previous week. She was told to go there to sign her contract. We got our jobs a few days apart in August.

End of our travail? No.

Seven months after I started working at Truba Arabia, I almost lost my job in a new trial that would further strengthen my faith afterwards. That was in February 2006, shortly after we moved to a new office. I had a falling out with our boss, an Egyptian with fiery mood swings.

As early as two months into my job, I started telling my wife how unhappy I was in it and that I wanted to quit owing to my boss’ temper. She pleaded with me to hang on until I could find another job. Her pay was not enough for us to live by. I took patience but it did not take long for my fuse to snap.

It happened one morning while he was ranting over what he perceived was a lapse in my work without giving me a chance to explain. “I can’t take this anymore and I don’t care if you fire me,” I told him and turned away without a by-leave. As I went back to my desk, he called out to Francis, who was our payroll officer, to close my account.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you this time. You shouldn’t have talked back,” Francis whispered when he went over to my desk. Another Filipino, Gilbert, our IT engineer, offered his sympathy. I put up a bold front. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “God will take care of me.”

Deep inside I was devastated. How will my wife take this? I prayed silently, “Lord, I don’t understand all of this, but I trust you. Please don’t leave us in the midst of this crisis.”

While I was packing my things, Francis told me our boss wanted me to stay. I learned later that our Filipino secretary, who was left at the old office to take telephone calls and monitor the fax messages while the communication lines at the new office were being set up, did not report to work that morning. I was to take his place in the meantime. He never showed up since then.

Francis made it clear to me that it was a holdover job that may last only for three months. I must start looking for a new job. When the telecommunication lines in the new office were put in place, I had to go. It was a week before March, the start of summer break for the Philippine schools in Saudi Arabia. I thanked God for the lifeline, hoping to get a teaching job in any Philippine school when classes opened in June, no matter if the pay would be smaller.

By May, Francis brought me good tidings. I was to be reassigned to the new office because the new secretary, an Indian, was not allowed by his previous employer to transfer. I moved to the new office within a week and worked as secretary to the newly hired executive manager, a Filipino who proved to be an epitome of civility.

I have been working with Truba Arabia for exactly two years last August 30. My wife has moved to one of Jeddah’s two biggest hospitals. Although we do not see any silver lining to our dream of moving to New Zealand, we try to keep still.

I have had my own share of answered prayers since I returned to the Faith after losing God when I was a journalism student in Manila and I have come to believe that when God closes doors He opens new ones. I believe in God’s mysterious ways.

September 2007

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This is a personal experience which I wrote for my assignment in a creative writing course that I took online with the Writers Bureau in London. This is among my many experiences that have strengthened my faith in the Almighty. It always puzzles me how prayer works at a time of our needs, the same way that it worked in the case of Bro. Albert Pecson, whose story I posted in this site with the title "A journey made in heaven" right before this blog.

A year after I wrote this story, the Saudi Gazette rehired me to help launch the Kabayan,as a Pilipino or Tagalog section of the paper, with a financial package much bigger than when I was fired in 2005. We have abandoned our plans to migrate to New Zealand after my wife's application for a visa as a caregiver in an institution for elderlies in Auckland was turned down by the visa officer in Dubai during the world recession because her job could be done by the natives who had returned home from other countries.

We have made plans to settle in Bacolod City after our daughter's graduation from high school here in Jeddah in three years time but have not closed the doors to some other possibilities, knowing from experience that God often works in His own mysterious ways. If this attitude appears like fanaticism to other people, so be it. That's what faith is all about, a firm belief and hope in the midst of uncertainties. As much as possible, I use reason as my guiding light in life but I cling to faith when reason does not seem to work anymore. As I put it in my book "The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays", in life's journey I use reason as my rudder but faith as my compass.

This article is included in my book.

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