Posts Tagged ‘stress’

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28
Oct

Two Dilemmas

Unemployment is a fascinating situation. So far I’ve discovered two really interesting dilemmas:

1. Progress through useless activity

Any job-search action I take has a very low probability of success and no guarantee of any usefulness, at maximum. Finding a job listing, sending in a resume or making contact with an interesting local resident may be the thing that gets me a job, but 999 times out of 1000, it’s not. Since each individual step seems so unlikely it registers psychologically as useless, there’s little motivation to take the steps. But if I refuse to take the steps because each one provides (nearly) zero results for non-zero effort, I will never find success. So basically the goal here is to keep doing things that feel useless, constantly. Very intriguing.

2. The genuineness dilemma

I think my biggest asset is that I’m naively, almost startlingly non-mercenary. I am quite specifically here to serve the people of Baltimore, just because Jesus loves them and I consider them valuable. It’s what I care about and currently my deepest measure of personal success.

So I’ll go to fairly significant expense and effort just to find ways I can help people, then help them in those ways. I could be a secretary, mop floors as a janitor, head up of a non-profit or stay unemployed and take people out for coffee, and I’ll be largely content and purposeful in any of those cases.

Content minus the fact that I’m not providing for my family, of course, and that’s an important pressure. Because the pressure to provide means that I want to get a job, and wanting to get a job means I’ll start turning whatever assets I have to influence people to want to hire me, which means that I’ll start being genuine and non-mercenary with an ulterior motive, which, we sadly conclude, is no longer non-mercenary, and is therefore no longer an asset.

So essentially my goal is to stay true, stay joyful, keep my value and purpose centered on Jesus, trust him to provide employment and/or money as the (true) need arises, and in the meantime keep doing important, useless things.

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20
Oct

Magnificat

The Song of Mary opened my eyes today. It’s easy in retrospect to see how right her praises are, that she was blessed for all generations and that God had shown powerful mercy to her.

But you have to remember that when she sang that, her life had just fallen apart. She was single, pregnant, probably presumed adulterous, and she’d just walked a mountainous and bandit-ridden road to her relatives’ distant homestead to get some space to think and avoid gossip (or stoning) and figure out what was next. At this stage, as far as we know, Joseph probably either didn’t know she was pregnant or was planning to divorce her. Life as she knew it was over.

Think about the decisions she must have made. She set her focus on God so intentionally that she could see her demolished life as a magnificent blessing, the envy of the generations. In the middle of personal crisis, unexpected pregnancy and hard work,1 what did it take to make the time to let God’s viewpoint infuse her?

See, it’s not about denial, some flaky positive-affirmation self-help that says the pain isn’t real. That’s just stupid. But if God is real and good, and if he made you for a reason, it’s equally stupid to say that the pain is where it ends. God did not create people as containers for problem-cluttered days. He has given each one of us a role in the renovation of the universe. Don’t let the pain blind you to the adventure.

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1 Middle Eastern village ladies don’t get a lot of leisure time. I’ve lived with some.