This Year

This year has been the longest and bleakest of what has been a fairly long and bleak career. There aren't a lot of jobs in my field--a hundred and fifty qualified people apply for each one. It's hard to explain to people who have the good fortune not to be in the same field as I am. I started applying for jobs 7 years ago, and have probably applied for 40-70 jobs a year. (Many of these aren't good jobs--they're just jobs. Probably 20 per year were decent jobs.)

Anyway, one of the really terrible things about me is that I'm embarrassingly persistent. But even I was on the verge of switching careers after expectations for a permanent position were unexpectedly pulled out from underneath me last July, leading to probably a year of low-level depression. Even more unexpectedly this spring all of that was reversed: I received a different offer for a more prestigious job and so my current employer stepped in and asked me to stay. And so we are happily staying. Nothing is perfect, but this is pretty darned close. I'm even ending up with paid maternity leave, which I wasn't expecting. (We had planned to have a second kid when we had a bit more stability and good maternity leave, but as that just simply wasn't happening, we threw caution to the wind.)

In the midst of this year, psychologically preparing to give up the career that I'd been preparing for during 6 years of graduate school and 6 years of non-permanent positions, interpreting the meaning of everything in terms of my faith was a pretty important part of that. What I came to was that at the end of the day, what I did for a career or job wasn't very important--focusing on Christ's sacrifice and loving Him and others is. It's funny now--in the midst of greater career happiness than I've ever had--which I know, like everything else, comes from God, focusing on that career happiness also seems like the wrong thing. Don't worry--I'm soaking in happiness; I can't believe my good fortune. But the same truths still hold--what I do for a career isn't very important--focusing on Christ's sacrifice and loving Him and others is.

And throughout my unstable career years, I have--for better and worse--worked on what I wanted to  and not what the field affirmed as valuable. And what I have worked on has been motivated by my faith. I hope I can continue to do that, so that my work--as unimportant as it is (and I can tell you I could probably count up the number of people who have read it because that number is not high)--will be something that I feel proud of.