How Job Searching Taught Me More About Myself

Image by Peter Kaminski

So the job market is a little less than ideal these days.

They told us before we graduated, but we weren't listening. We were COLLEGE STUDENTS. Of course we weren't listening. "Surely it can't be THAT bad," we thought.

It's THAT bad.

When I decided to move to Nashville, I didn't realize I was walking into a job deadzone. I am living in the Bermuda Triangle of jobs.

The more twenty somethings I meet in Nashville, the more people I realize have been affected by the lack of specialized jobs available. Some are getting scrappy at restaurants and coffee shops to pay the bills. Others are holding out for a career entry point. "I just want a place where I can learn and grow in my field. I wish someone would just give me a shot!"

I was talking to one of my best friends about jobs the other day. He, like many other people, has been trying to get in with a cool company who will mentor him into a fine businessman. "I want to be a part of a company where I can grow to be an integral part of it. I want to find a place of belonging in a company I believe in," he said.

There's something special about that desire. 

We as humans have this desire to bring something unique and necessary into a larger group, something that will make that group better and stronger. We want to be an integral part of something bigger. When we don't feel like we are, it makes us restless.

I moved to Nashville get the space necessary to write a book about deep self identity. Along the way, though, I've noticed myself becoming antsy. I found my time increasingly evaporating on job websites and applications, instead of using my time to write the book I feel called to write. Yeah, I've got a job that pays the bills, but I need a cool job. What's happening?

Fear. Fear of not measuring up, fear of not being important, fear of not having enough money, fear of not meaning anything to any larger body of people. Fear has robbed a significant amount of my time here in Nashville.

Here's what I've learned. Living out of fear robs us. It keeps us from living in the larger story, the one God is masterfully crafting around us and is calling us to have a significant role in, and it keeps us confined to our own smaller stories.

We let our small narratives rule our lives by fear.

Our hearts were made for the bigger story. We can see it in everything we want most deeply in this world. I can see it in the desire my friends and I have to be an integral part of a cool company, to have a job that not just anyone can do.

The funny thing is, the book I'm writing IS that avenue into the bigger story for me. It IS the place I'm called to lay down self preservation and fight for people's deep selves. But all too often, fear pulls me back into my smaller story of wanting money or recognition or importance (job wise), and I become miserable again. And I begin trying to control everything. And I stop living in the Gospel.

There's something in this world that's larger than jobs.

We know it. But do we actually know it?

Don't be robbed of your part in the larger story because of fear. God gave us the stories in the Bible, and among them the book of Esther, to show us that he is in control. And he is worthy of control. He does crazy things in order to not just provide for his people, but to elevate them to unimaginable places (like Esther becoming queen) when the larger story calls for it.

Be vigilant. Don't let the enemy use fear and self preservation to cause you to miss out on what you were made for. Because the human heart was made to take part in something bigger than a job squabble. It was made to take part in a sublime rescue story, an adventure of epic proportions.

Proverbs 20:5 - "The purpose in a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding will draw them out."