Safe Landings (part 2)

So, what happened? You’re a smart person, and you know I didn’t get that job. Why else would I still be writing this unemployment blog?

The truth is, I honestly don’t know what happened. When I returned from my overseas trip, I eventually heard that they offered the job to someone else. The job it seemed so clearly that God was orchestrating for me.

I was disappointed, yes. But not crushed.

In the process of interviewing for the job, I learned I was pretty overqualified for the position. Sure, I knew I might have to take something less than a dream job, that experience and college degree aside, I eventually might need to work at Starbucks or Target to help pay the bills.

It’s just that mere weeks into this unemployment season, I wasn’t sure I was supposed to take a job that wouldn’t really satisfy me vocationally and financially. At least, not yet.

Still, it would have been amazing to land in a new job so quickly and easily.

Perhaps this potential employer knew I was a flight risk. Perhaps they sensed my less than 100% enthusiasm about the job. Perhaps they found someone better qualified or with a better personality fit for the staff.

I don’t know.

But here’s what I do know: God still provided this job possibility.

He knew I needed to see a potential future as I was packing up after 15 years in my old job, so I wouldn’t feel as much like I was in some big vocational free-fall. He knew I needed something to mention when well-meaning but clueless people asked, “So, what are you going to do?” only one, two, three days after I’d been laid off. (As if I was supposed to have it all mapped out already.) He knew it would be easier for me to leave the country and be fully present with my overseas friend if I knew there was something in the works job-wise back home. He knew that on that trip I’d be willing to talk about trust in the midst of unemployment to an audience filled with other job-less folks, both for their benefit as well as for mine.

He knew I needed to see his fingerprints in the midst of this sudden, astonishing turn of events.

There’s something I’ve always loved in those Bible stories where Jesus heals people: His touching the leper. His putting his fingers in the ears of the deaf man. His stopping and turning all his attention on the woman who’d been bleeding for years.

Before he provided a physical healing, he attended to the emotional needs. Because of their ailments, these people had been shunned, considered unclean, rendered invisible in their culture. They had missed out on so much. They no doubt craved the kind of touch and attention Jesus so readily and wisely and lovingly provided.

And he did this first.

Remembering this, I realize that in the end, that job wasn’t my safe landing. God was. He was attending to my emotional and relational needs first.

And this is why still-unemployed me is able to trust (at least most days) that the physical provision is still on its way.