There is purpose in your unemployment.

BY SARAH SHEARER

Sarah is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied nonfiction writing and French. She loves finding stories within people and bringing them to life — when she’s not watering her basil plant or making kombucha in her kitchen.

The shift was hard to detect.

From an outside perspective, my daily rhythms as an unemployed, new wife looked largely the same as they did when I was single and working at my internship from home earlier in the year. Unfortunately, an outside perspective is hard to maintain when you live inside of it each day. And between me and you, the inside can be a hard place.

I’d wake up at vaguely the same time each morning, step down our creaky red staircase, and put on water for tea. After spending some time in the Word and eating breakfast (cornflakes or eggs), with my tea, I’d write a to-do list on the couch.* It consists mostly of tasks such as reading emails, combing through LinkedIn and other job-searching sites, personal reading and writing, exercising, & making lunch, and the occasional loaf of banana bread.**

*I’m not an interior designer, but if you’re going to invest in one good piece of furniture (besides your bed), I urge you to get a nice sofa. Get one from a bona fide furniture store, if you can manage. It will help massively when you’ve got some planning to do. I’m not sure I can explain it, but sitting on my brown couch makes me feel like even if I don’t know where to go next in life, at least I’ve got a nice comfy seat to sit and figure it all out.

**I should also add that a steady consumption of both coffee and tea is indispensable to my routine and is possibly a leading reason that I feel most-suited sitting at a desk, an office kitchen within arm’s reach. 

Making a routine for myself was one of the ways I kept a semblance of normal life when I worked at my internship from home in the spring. But that internship ended and, after a whirlwind of a summer filled with getting married and moving, I found myself looking out my window with no job to go to each morning. 

Now that I spend my days mostly at home again, reaching for my to-do list paper was a natural fix. It all seemed to fill the day quite easily. Except when it didn’t. This time, the steadiness of home life doesn’t feel as satisfying without the undercurrent of a job.  

I don’t know how else to describe the feeling besides pressure. Pressure from myself to find a job, find a place to productively spend my daytime hours and a reason to buy a lunch box. It almost felt that, without a job, I wasn’t justified in doing things for myself. It became hard to devote myself to the personal projects I had wanted the time for because it wasn’t propelling me toward the next thing. 

Ugh. You know what kind of a life that is? A tiring one. I was practicing a life without purpose.*

*Lie number one. 

I must say this clearly for both my clarity and yours, if you’re in this with me: It is fundamentally impossible for you to *lose* your purpose. It is not a small dog you must keep on a leash, or a cake you need to bake just right if anyone’s going to eat it. The fact of that matter is, friend, that you and your purpose were created inextricably. You were designed by God, our ever-loving Father, to live every day and draw every drop of strength from Him. Your purpose is to live joyfully in love and freedom because He gave His only Son to have a close relationship with you. How could your purpose, in light of that, hinge on your ability to find employment?

Yes, it is good to work. But in a season filled with a lot of sent applications and much fewer responses, I have no choice but to believe God sees me. He sees my efforts, and He sees yours. And while we sit together in this waiting room, we could wallow in our no-lunch-box lives, or we can take our thoughts captive and lay them before God. 

There are good things for you to do today, friend, of this I am firmly sure, because your tasks don’t have to be Big and professionally important for them to matter. God sees you in the in-between, and He cares for you there just the same.  And if all you’ve got today, like me, is a hand-written to-do list sitting on the coffee table, do the tasks. I don’t care if you’ve only got one thing. Do it joyfully. Sometimes your purpose is to show up to a job you studied years for. Sometimes it’s to do laundry and bake banana bread. But it’s always to do it for the glory of God. There’s the joy, friend.

I’m cheering you on from my brown couch. And then I’m gonna get up and run around the block before getting started on dinner. Do your small tasks with great purpose and I’ll do mine. Whether we know it or not, at some point, all the smallness will get lost in the greater narrative of our lives. It’s all going to make for a great story.