No Fair

Before my sophomore year in college, I managed to get a job at the Puyallup Fair, a popular event in the Puget Sound area. I worked as an attendant for games during the evening. It was a good experience overall; I met some cool people, coworkers and otherwise, and it was pretty exciting when someone won. And, of course, I was making money to pay for school.

One night, after my co¬workers had already left (this was normal, leaving one at a time), one of the fair’s managers came up to me and said someone had seen me giving away one of the prizes. I had read the worker’s manual and knew that this was pretty much illegal to the point of prosecution. I made it a point never to do this, so I was surprised by this accusation. We had a fairly heated argument, each one insisting that the other was wrong, but by the end of it, because my coworkers weren’t there to help defend me, I ended up losing my job.

I managed to keep my composure on my way out of the fairgrounds, but as soon as I was on the road back to the parking lot, I broke down and started crying. I could only repeat to myself the unfairness of the situation, my coworkers’ absence being the subject of my ire.

But as I drove home, I started to think that perhaps this was just one of life’s trials. So I started doing something that always calms my nerves: singing.

The song was called “Better Than I,” from the movie Joseph, King of Dreams, a dramatic retelling of the Joseph story in Genesis. The song plays when Joseph is in prison, has already watched the baker and cup-bearer leave, and appears to have no hope of getting out. Here’s the chorus:

You know better than I
You know the way
I’ve let go the need to know why
For you know better than I

Somehow, singing this put me at ease. I realized that all I could do was hope that God would give me the patience and the attitude to make it through this situation, however unfair it may have been. So even when I got home, told my parents what happened, and Mom advised me to “give God a piece of [my] mind,” I was already starting to feel better.

This experience has taught me that tough things happen every day, things we can’t change. So whenever I do run into such problems, I just try to remember that God does, in fact, know better than I.

Brian Basquez writes from the Pacific Northwest.

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