Thank you all again for praying. This time I have a big praise God to share.
Right now I'm still on a 6 month contract, but the company likes my work so much, the president of the company is now talking about buying out my contract prematurely in order to make me a permanent employee.
There's still a possibility of letting the 6 month contract run its course, but there's actually a flattering reason for that. So far, multiple customers have praised my work, and my employer wants me to keep them happy by continuing to produce work for all of them. As long as I'm a contractor, I can do that. I can work on multiple projects for customers who compete with each other.
Once I'm permanent, I have to be assigned to one customer. Why? I can't reveal our customers, so to use a fake example as an illustration, their policy is that if we had JC Penny as our primary customer, then once I'm permanent, I have to become a sub-employee of JC Penney in order to get direct access to JC Penney resources. JC Penny would provide me with a special computer and a secure way to talk to JC Penny's computers. At that point, I couldn't do any work for Macy's or Target, etc., because I'd be doing it largely on JC Penny's dime. And JC Penny wouldn't want me to use their resources to help their competitors.
Anyway, combine this with the fact that I really enjoy living in Round Rock so far, this turned out to be a huge blessing for me and my family. We'll still have a lot of financial problems which will take two or three years to resolve, and I'll never be able to retire, but that's just life. We'll just have to walk by faith on that.