A week or two before Christmas 2016, a man in his mid-to-late thirties stopped by the office of the church where I was working at the time. He had several Walmart bags full of princess dolls, Disney coloring books, other toys for young girls. By some clerical error, a church in Granite City, IL (about thirty minutes away) had donated them to him even though he didn’t have daughters of the right age to enjoy them. He wanted to hand them over to our church’s own Christmas toy drive, which he had somehow heard about.

I thanked the man and we talked for a few minutes afterwards. Feeling the need, I imagine, to explain why he was the recipient of toy drive donations in the first place, he told me that he had been laid off eleven months earlier by the U.S. Steel plant in Granite City. The year had been very difficult, he said, “but God makes a way for you to get through it.” Then he smiled and left.

I’ve thought about that guy quite a bit over the last two years, usually in the context of decent, hard-working people getting caught up in the vagaries of an inconceivably complex globalized economy. Like death, his unemployment remained abstract to me – a tragic but still pretty interesting phenomenon that happened to other people.

That is, until it happened to me. I now have profound respect for that laid-off steelworker, who seemed to have preserved his faith and cheerfulness over the course of nearly a year (and probably longer than that afterwards – U.S. Steel didn’t call anyone back until early 2018). I myself was without work for a mere three and a half months, and this was easily one of the darkest periods of my life. Other circumstances contributed to the terribleness, to be sure, but joblessness was the major shareholder.

The pain unemployment causes is rich and multifaceted. For starters, I spent a quarter of a year providing nothing to the material well-being of my family (other than $12 I made from a day’s worth of jury duty, in which my primary contribution to the cause of justice in St Louis was getting the soda machine in the breakroom to work). My wife possesses a specialized skill set in a high-demand medical field, while I’m in ministry in decidedly non-megachurch contexts, so I’ve always known I wouldn’t be the primary breadwinner for the family. But knowing that I was making none of the money I was spending – that I was basically a net economic drain to my family –  wasn’t easy to take.

(Yes, I did a lot of chores, child-care, etc., etc., which I know should have eased this particular psychological burden at least somewhat. It didn’t; why it didn’t is partly because I’m just not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent, partly because of some gender role stuff that would be interesting to explore at some point but isn’t pertinent here).

During seminary especially, but in also in the years afterwards, I often found myself longing for more “free time.” This turned out to be a monkey’s paw. “Free time” is a concept that makes sense only when the majority of your time is taken up by various productive endeavors. For me, having most of my time “free” turned out to be weirdly, ironically oppressive. I searched for jobs (more on that in a bit); I blogged; I noodled around on the guitar; I listened to spring training games on the radio; I played with Ellie – and there was never not laundry to do. And yet there seemed to be hours every day that were just blank, devoid of structure or purpose. I began having difficulty remembering what day of the week it was, every day being pretty much the same day.

In that sense I’m highly impressed by stay-at-home parents, who evidently have the discipline to create the structures and routines necessary to avoid insanity. That’s not something I managed in those three months.

It would be remiss of me, of course, to not mention that being jobless opened up some experiences I couldn’t have had otherwise. The most important of these was spending hours with my daughter as she grew into a precocious, beautiful little girl. Her vocabulary entering 2019 was approximately five words; now she knows hundreds (including the definitions of a lot of words she can’t yet say), and can even string together a few basic sentences. I got a front-row seat to this rapid linguistic development, when she started learning new words almost literally every day. In large part, I think, this is due to the fascination with books she’s exhibited almost since she’s become aware of anything; on a somewhat-related note, over the last few months I’ve acquired deep familiarity with – almost to the point of knowing by heart – a substantial portion of Dr. Seuss’s literary output.

(I also know more about Sesame Street than you do, but that’s a story for another time).

Any day the weather was halfway decent, we went on walks around the neighborhood or to the nearby park. I saw her develop a curiosity and delight in the natural world, from dirt and rocks (snow was an acquired taste, both literally and metaphorically), to trees and flowers, to birds and squirrels. But most important are the dogs, which she thinks are just the best thing about this planet.

Watching her discover the world is rediscovering it myself, one of the joys of parenthood that I did not anticipate. The other is seeing her personality bloom and grow in real time, independently of me, a being that somehow I helped bring into existence but is still wholly other. And also really funny. She has an extremely unfortunate-but-hilarious pronunciation of the word “frog.” She tries to turn off the TV when I’m watching some boring lecture or documentary or something. She holds hour-long conferences with her menagerie of stuffed animals when she should be napping. One time, when I was myself half-asleep on the sofa, she brought the dustpan from the kitchen and calmly smacked me upside the head with it – either as punishment for not paying attention to her, or to determine whether or not I was still alive, I do not know. On her face was the most solemn expression imaginable.

Ellie also spent a good deal of time playing by herself while her old man interminably applied for jobs. In the year 2019, this means filling out hundreds online applications and sending them into the void; presently the void would send back form emails including phrases like “not the best fit for what we are looking for right now” and “good luck with your career.”

Eventually I received an email from a professional resume-writing service. Having somehow gotten a hold of my resume, they explained to me in some detail that the document wasn’t worth the bytes that stored it, and that the algorithms companies use to filter out irrelevant resumes were most certainly filtering out mine. My resume needed a visual redesign to reduce clutter. It needed to focus on my accomplishments rather than my job duties. It needed exciting verbs like “innovate,” “transform,” and “slash [costs],” instead of boring ones like “implement” and “develop.”

After a couple more weeks of futile job applications, I finally caved and coughed up the money to have my resume professionally rewritten. Presently it appeared, sleekly redesigned and chock-full of accomplishments and dynamic verbs. I began sending it out to prospective employers almost immediately.

The following week I received an email from another resume-writing service, including a link to a lengthy report detailing the numerous and varied ways my (new) resume didn’t have a prayer of getting through the algorithms. It was in bad need of a visual redesign, etc., etc. There was, however, no need for despair: they would be happy to rewrite my resume for a very reasonable sum.

When I make a new acquaintance, probably the second or third thing I’ll ask is “What do you do?” Fairly often the other person beats me to it. We’re trying to establish some framework for understanding (and let’s be honest, evaluating) each other, and one of the key components of such a framework is our respective livelihoods. We base many of our expectations of what the other person is going to be like on their occupation. We’re going to behave differently around a trucker versus a theoretical physicist – almost whether we want to or not. And this is true in a bar, a baseball game, a church.

Speaking of church, I once heard of a pastor who forbade anyone in his congregation from asking anyone else what they did for a living. I think that’s a beautiful idea, but I imagine it must be incredibly disorienting – I’ll just say it – especially for men. How do you get a feel for another guy when you don’t even know what he does? At least you can always talk about sports.  

If our sense of identity is a Jenga tower, then our profession is one of those slabs that will probably bring down the whole thing if you pull it out. Of course people continue to refer to themselves as engineers, steelworkers, pastors, etc, even when they’re “in between jobs.” But as the period of unemployment wears on, that sense of belonging to a profession grows weaker and more confused. Joblessness pulls on that particular slab, and none too gently either.

Christians living through extended unemployment find themselves living in a paradox. On the one hand, our lives are “hidden in Christ,” who alone defines our identities. The unconditional love of God through Christ is our poured out in our hearts as a sheer gift, unearned and unearnable. His judgment is ultimately the only one that matters, and he has pronounced us not only innocent but beloved. And nothing can separate us from his love, neither height nor depth, nor principalities or powers, nor prolonged unemployment, nor having majored in the “wrong” subject in college and thus being ineligible for STEM jobs, nor anything else in heaven or on earth. Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

The other reality is that our survival is dependent on interacting with a staggeringly vast and complex globalized economy that doesn’t (and apparently can’t) show a lot of grace. To be more precise, you aren’t going to starve in this country, but your life can get miserable indeed if you’re able-bodied but can’t find work. Salvation is by grace, but having anything like a decent life this side of heaven calls for blood-sweat-and-tears performance (“Out here in the fields / I fight for my meals” and all that).

Here’s another thing. Christ is our identity as Christians, but we’re still human beings. As such, the drive to cultivate, produce, organize, create – to work – is fundamental to our created natures even before the fall (cf., Genesis 1:26, 2:15). That’s how God made us. So the psychological suffering and even the partial loss of identity that come from unemployment are not simply due to some lack of faith, or a failure to find our joy in Christ. And they’re not simply due to our culture’s obsession with work and productivity either, although that obsession is real and it certainly doesn’t help.

Now obviously you don’t need to work a traditional 9-5 or even an income to fulfill this need to work – but see above paragraph regarding survival and economics, etc. Not many adults are in a position to pour ourselves into a non-lucrative endeavor (but please don’t get me wrong, it’s great if you are; I’ve got zero contempt for people who don’t have to make money). All this means that our innate drive to work combined with economic reality makes prolonged unemployment a dark night, indeed. It’s an existential threat, both physically and psychologically.

(I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that being unemployed makes people look at you differently. That’s not supposed to matter, of course, but in a world where a great deal rides on how other people perceive you, it does).

This paradox – that we live under grace and under law (economic pressures, social expectations), that all we have is Christ but that we need a lot of other things to make it in this world – is not resolvable. One set of facts will never subsume the other. We will live in both realities, as contradictory as they are, until we are present with the Lord.

As I write this, I am watching my daughter repeatedly run back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, depositing baby wipes in various places as she goes. She is making loud proclamations in her own private language. She’s singing. If she never does a dadgum thing with her life; if she never earns a dollar; if she is dependent on us for the rest of her life for everything…

Then she’ll be enough for me. She already is and always will be. And there is nothing she can do to change that.

Obviously none of that is going to pay her rent. Nor will it necessarily help her develop her latent talents or find a fulfilling career. All of my fatherly love plus two-and-a-half dollars will buy her a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

But maybe I can tear a bit of a hole in this supply-and-demand, Realpolitik world where she can find shelter. And if I, being evil, know how to give good gifts to my child, how much more does our Heavenly Father care for us? His grace doesn’t necessarily fix problems, or even remove much of the pain. But in some ineffable way, it is sufficient. And regardless of what the labor market is telling us about ourselves, his grace makes us enough.