The Shock of Lost Income

Regaining Your Self-Respect

Photo by Craig Garner on Unsplash

Stunned hardly begins to describe how you feel when your income is ripped away.

This article describes three steps to recover your self-respect after the enormous emotional hit it takes when:

· You’re tossed out the door in the name of creating a better “bottom line” for your employer.

· Federal, state and local businesses slam shut businesses and churches at random because of a pandemic.

· Your state legislature passes California Assembly bill 5, a wicked piece of union-written legislation that bans independent contract and freelance work performed within the state. (With worse coming from the pending Federal ProACT and other similar legislation which would ban it nationwide.)

We should all have some kind of emergency savings but most people have only a small amount put by at best, with their spiritual and emotional reserves even thinner. The American middle-class has seen the cost-of-living skyrocket dozens of times. Lower-income families can barely feed themselves, even with teens and adults holding down multiple jobs. In either situation, going just one month without income is devastating.

Three Steps to Regain Our Self-Respect

In almost all cases, it is not your fault, or mine, that our income is stripped away or we’re eking out an existence on social security. First, while we are in shock, we should limit our driving, if we venture out at all those first few days.

We can even apply for unemployment insurance online in most states, yet as terrified and distracted as we’re feeling, this isn’t the time to be going frantically from door to door for interviews. Also, on the phone, we tend to telegraph our desperation. If we need professional help to cope with the panic, we should seek it unashamedly!

The First Step

This first step is highly personal but before we do anything, we need to pray for guidance from our Heavenly Father, in whichever way we’ve been taught. He knows perfectly well what has happened to us but needs us to be humble enough to ask for help, so our minds can be clear.