I got a job today! I
am so excited, and feel so blessed, to be chosen as a new counselor for Hope
Clinic for Women. Even before the second
interview, I knew that I badly wanted this job – that, of all the jobs for
which I’d applied this summer, this was the one about which I felt most
passionate and fired up. Of course, in
my mind, that meant I was most unlikely to actually GET the job.
Talking it over with my friend, I found myself saying, “It’s
not so much that I don’t have a God of abundance, but that I have issues with ‘deserving’
grace, and we live in a culture of scarcity.”
Each part of that is true – but mostly the middle bit.
I had a hard time feeling hopeful this summer. Panicky, desperate, despondent all made a few
appearances, but hope was a challenge.
Unemployment has had a chokehold on some of the people I love for a very
long time, and on some level I believed I didn’t deserve to get a job until
they did. It wouldn’t be fair – and I am
determined, perhaps in vain, for my theology to be “fair”.
God IS abundance, of course – God’s inherently inclined to
want and do the best for everyone. But
we get in God’s way. Our economy and
cultural worldview seems to prevent many business people from taking a chance
on hiring folks, investing in them, embracing the opportunity to take care of
neighbors by providing health care. But
even that is not fair; every business leader has a responsibility to their
families, their employees, and their shareholders to protect livelihoods, and
that may mean erring on the side of caution in many ways. Or, you know, some folks are greedy – but not
everyone. The moral of the story is that
there seems to be a low-grade panic throughout the economy, lessening only
slightly over the last year or so, which makes job security very much scarce.
And now I have a job.
Someone has taken a chance on me and is willing to invest training in me
so that I can serve people who need help.
I can hardly believe my good luck, and am irrationally worried that I
imagined the whole hiring phone call.
But the fact is that I am hired, and that is so validating.
Coming up to my baptism next week, this morning’s news has
reminded me that I need to reconcile my idea of an abundant God with my skepticism
of grace. On the one hand, believing
that good and bad things just happen as a matter of luck means that God’s not
involved in bad things happening to good people, which (kind of) takes care of
the suffering & meaning issue. On
the other, this perspective gives almost ALL the power to the people, and
contradicts my own felt need for the peace and humility of learning how to “let
go and let God”.
