Today was a weird day. It was just . . . weird. I had been planning to use this week – Spring Break – to do some serious job-hunting and I’ve been putting it off. Then Mom called and asked me to come over so she could help me do all this stuff. Within minutes of the call, I’m on my knees in my prayer closet, sobbing. Nothing undoes me like job-hunting and I’ve been doing it for so long now. I tried to figure out what lies I’ve been believing all these years to make me dread it so – for it must be lies that make me feel so hopeless, so full of dread, so angry that I have to keep doing this. God’s truths wouldn’t reduce me to this; they wouldn’t make me feel so bad. One of the lies is that whatever I do, it will go nowhere. One of the things I have been believing about my current job as a matter of fact. After all, everyone else is looking for jobs, the economy is crushed, and I haven’t put in nearly enough effort to yield anything. I’ll just be job-hunting my entire life.
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Lie #2: I’m so desperate to escape this job that I won’t be able to discern a good job from a job I want for the escape it offers, and I’ll just flip right out of the frying pan into the fire. I’ll keep bouncing from hateful job to hateful job forever.
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Well, obviously, those are totally imbalanced views of the thing. The fuel for the fire is that my experience with work has only ever been bad. The couple of years I honestly enjoyed my job hit a brick wall of betrayal of my ideals. It turned out to be a lie. So I have no way to really picture a job I love that I can feel good about feeling good about.
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I’m afraid I didn’t acquit myself well at Mom’s house. I was grouchy on steroids: hunching over my computer, frowning mightily with the pounding headache right behind my eyes (not helped by the crying jag in my bathroom beforehand), monosyllabic responses. I felt bad about it afterwards – I wasn’t really showing my faith in God to my mother who struggles with that herself. She even said to me, “You don’t believe God will lead you to a job that won’t be a total drudgery?” I said, no, I didn’t think that, and that was the truth, but I still couldn’t figure out how to stand on the truth. Even more than the dark periods of doubt about my purpose for B____ and his family where I just had to stand on what I know, it seemed with my work that I couldn’t see which truths to apply. I felt so strongly that God is all over this other part of my life – the life outside of work – but that he just keeps forgetting to notice this third of my life that’s melting away. Which is absolutely incorrect. And I know it.
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So I went for a walk to clear my head in the beautiful hot afternoon and on a whim – I get a lot of those, don’t I? – I took the path rarely taken; the same path I walked down (and journaled about later) a year and a half ago when I was wrestling with signing up for Match.com. I remember that day so clearly – I so recall what it felt like to be closed in on all sides with choices I didn’t want to make, this me who had not yet met the most remarkable, stubborn, complicated maddening man in the world, who had no notion of how to fight a real enemy or keep taking steps in the dark. Man, I remember when all I could see was not love or grand purpose or satisfaction in my God but just the cold, tight limitations of my present circumstances. And look what God did with that infinitesimal seed of simply creating my profile on Match. And who’s to say he can’t do the same thing with the tiny seed of a random online job application? He knew all my visualization entries. He knew what I dreamed for in love, what would satisfy my long-unfulfilled longings. For heaven’s sake, he made them, didn’t he?
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Well, he did the same with my dreams for my work. He knows I need more than just pushing papers around; I need to believe in what I’m doing. I believe there are many people who don’t have that need because they get fulfillment outside of work, and those people are necessary. But I need to have a point, a purpose in my work. I need to know I’m making a difference. He knows this. He knows that there is a time for blooming where you’re planted, for training seasons and preparation chambers, and a time for a true calling. He knows I just want to wake up in the morning and not have to brace myself for the day, marshal my resources, and launch into the litany of reasons to be grateful. I want to get word that I’ve got the job – whatever it is – and say, “I can’t wait to get started.” It does a lot of good, it really does, to pass the test when you do have to keep pressing forward, drawing all your strength from God. It prepares you to keep holding to him even when the famine gives way to plenty and everything is so much easier. But he also knows I don’t want another place-holder in my life. Another “bloom where you’re planted.” It’s time for me to discover at last what it’s like for something to work the way it’s supposed to. I want to feel the way I feel with this purpose for my people. Even in the dark moments, it doesn’t take long before I’m standing straight again, exulting in the firmness and rightness of my purpose.
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To tell you the truth, even more than being a College Textbook Sales Representative, which really is tailor-made for my personality and experience, I want to help people. Women in particular. Young women as they navigate this life and the often unsettling business of finding God in their everyday struggles. I’ve started posting these journal entries on a blog and have truly helped guide or comfort to couple of my friends. I’ve learned some hard lessons and my heart is that of a teacher, and I’m still in that “young women” stage of life. I feel I have so much to offer. And I have no idea, not a clue, how God might use that. But it is pleasing to him, I know that much. I’d love to do something like that, something meaty and real and needed. And he knows that, too.
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I’m going to trust that this God who is so intent on my good and attentive to my every need is not forgetful. He knows how important one’s work is to oneself and how very much good one can do through work. I’m trusting that this God who knows exactly what I crave in love and is forming that as we speak is also quite aware of every desire and urge he put into my composition for my work.
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His eye is ever on my end, and he has a marvelous job out there for me in the wilderness. A job I would never have imagined at my college job fair. A job that lifts my heart and grounds my spirit at the mere thought of it. A job where I make a difference, help others improve their lives, and teach and train where it’ll actually go somewhere. A job where I can use all these lessons I’ve learned and know what fulfillment is.
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