Why I’m Still Out of a Job

 

It ain’t because there is no work available. Let’s get that right out in front of everything else. All the world is screaming out for labor; look around you. Every Walgreens and McDonald’s is looking to pick up some extra help. If I were a video game character and I were playing through life as myself I would be picking up extra shifts in between job applications. I’d have a job in a week; a good job, one that my mother would be proud to tell her friends about. I’d still pick up shifts at McDonald’s; more money is better than less money, and there’s nothing wrong with those jobs.

Video game characters don’t get tired, not like real people do. I’d have an even better job a month after that. Not honestly mind you; I wouldn’t have given full value to that first employer, not enough to cover the costs of hiring and training me. Video game NPCs don’t fill out government paperwork. And they take it pretty well when you do things that’d seem skeezy to real people. But I’m not a video game character and I’m not moving up in the world.

I’d rather do almost anything in the world than go job hunting. Now, there are a great many things that are wrong with the job market but the thing I really can’t stand is the lying. No job description ever really describes the job you’ll be doing; “must be able to bend and lift 50 lbs. frequently” means “You’ll spend all night sweating to lug trailer hitches around, hating your life.” True story. But that’s at most half the equation. You have to lie to get a job. You have to stretch the truth on a resume. “I know how to use the SUM function in Excel” becomes “high level proficiency with Microsoft Office.” You lie on the job interview. And somehow we’re still surprised that no one’s happy with the job they’re doing.

And so I’ve been eating my seed corn. While working in the hard drive factory I built up a surplus of cash, and living fairly simply I haven’t yet worn it out. Thing is, I know how the game is played; I know what a tremendously bad idea living like that is. I’m a good conservative, mind you. Those that don’t work don’t eat, and I’ve never seen anything wrong with that. I figured when I got hungry enough I’d do something at least. In my darker musings ‘hungry’ wasn’t a metaphor.

Today though, I have a calling. Let me tell you a story. It begins yesterday morning, when I’m waking up and trying not to. Too awake to sleep, too tired to get up and do anything. I’m trying to shut down my spinning mind, and so I begin to pray. Praying is an excellent thing to do in those situations. Now, most of my prayers are of the “Lord, I want” variety, but when I’m feeling a little more formal I go through a checklist of things to talk to God about. First item on the list is Adoration; praise to the Lord. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, praying alone with no guide, but I found I was rapidly running out of things to say. When you’re singing a song there’s the next line, and when the song’s done you’re done. But what do you do when you’ve got no hymnal?

What I do in those cases, I recount the Lord’s mighty deeds of the past. They’re good to remember, and you’ll find plenty of support for the idea in the Psalms even if you’re having trouble finding them in modern worship music. I’m not terribly poetic about it, though I try to be. “Oh Lord, remember that time you gave manna to the Israelites in the desert? And —

And I got stuck there. I couldn’t think of anything else. Okay, clear my mind and… nothing. Do it again; still stuck on manna. I should probably think through that story; God is trying to tell me something. Okay, Israelites in the desert, no food “why have you brought us out here to die?” manna on the rocks, they could gather enough for one day, but more than that and it’d spoil, except for the day before the sabbath when it’d last for two days, oh. They were living day to day dependent on God’s grace. Oh. Okay, that’s it.

Uh oh. Jumping back to video games, you ever run into a room, find medkits and ammo, and realize there’s a boss fight coming up? Yeah. The good Lord doesn’t often speak to me, so that probably means something hard is coming up. Great, I’ll just walk around with a feeling of impending doom all day. But I did keep that in mind, and the “Give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s prayer. And I thought about that, sitting outside the CVS. I had some prescriptions to pick up.

Thing is, I briefly have insurance, related to that trailer hitch thing I mentioned. But I didn’t do enough work to merit using the insurance. So do I buy the pills without insurance and take a hit to my dwindling resources, or do I do something I think is dishonest? I tabled the discussion and went in to buy Zyrtec. I have it prescribed for my allergies, and burn through it like California wilderness. Thirty pills to the bottle run out fairly quickly. I figured I’d pick up two. On the shelf there’s the normal bottles, and “Ten extra pills!” same price. There are exactly two of the bonus bottles in stock.

I laughed. When the Lord speaks to me it’s usually in the form of a joke. Not making light of a thing; laughter as an expression of joy. “What are you worried about? I’ve got this.” It’s all well and good to believe in manna on a desert hillside ages ago. I find it harder to stomach in corporate America, present day. And… right as I’m writing this I got a call asking for a little help on spreadsheet work. Friend of mine runs a small business, can use a little on-the-cheap automation. Whaddaya know.

Then this morning the other shoe dropped. Woke up early. Didn’t have to get up for another while yet. Clear head, warm bed, I lay there thinking for a while. My mind sped up. You know how people talk about getting in the zone? I was leaping from idea to inference to insight just like that. “The amount is irrelevant; a man who will kill for a million dollars will kill for five bucks if the circumstances are right.” I couldn’t have told you that yesterday. The most fundamental truths of reality can’t be comprehended by the human brain; it’s a limitation in the matter. Like a black hole, you can only make inferences by the way light bends around it. That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

That’s all I have to do. Speak the Truth. That’s it. The Truth can be an immense and terrible thing, but I can do that. And for now, the place I need to do that is on Ricochet. The Lord is directing this operation, and He will move me as He needs me to move. No job applications, no government programs, The Lord has given me this calling, and the Lord will provide. I won’t even have to sell my Magic collection. You just wait and see.

(And if He doesn’t? What will you say when you’re starving? Well, I don’t know. I’ve never been in that dire situation before. I hope and I trust that I will still praise the Lord.)

Published in Religion & Philosophy
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  1. Sisyphus Member
    Sisyphus
    @Sisyphus

    Magnificent post, Hank, thanks for sharing. As for prayer and the loss of words, He gave us one we can pray anytime, anywhere, for all occasions. 

    Our Father who art in Heaven,
    hallowed be thy name.
    Thy kingdom come,
    thy will be done,
    on Earth as it is in Heaven.
    Give us this day our daily bread,
    and forgive us our trespasses
    as we forgive those who trespass against us,
    and lead us not into temptation but
    deliver us from evil.
    For Thine is the kingdom and the power
    and the glory, forever and ever. 
    Amen.

    I try to pray it every day, never paying any mind to the wags that speak against rote prayer. He knew that when we are weak in mind and heart and spirit and tired and the words won’t come we need to pray the most. And in showing us how to pray he shows us what to pray for. Pray for our daily sustenance. Pray for His forgiveness. Pray for our deliverance. Pray for His will to be done because all of these things are His will.

    The final bit is believed to have found its way in a little later but been accepted by consensus, it is our praise for him and acclamation of His rule as the only good king. Any doubts I may have had on its inclusion were banished when I read Father Amorth’s note on prayer. He said the bits of prayer that pain our lurking demons the most are the bits where we praise Him. The fallen, having rebelled, hate to face their horrible error.

    And we never pray it alone. With over a billion Christians scattered around the globe anytime we say it there are others saying it as well.

    And He showed us to pray as a part of whole body for the whole body. We are never alone. Our Father is always with us, especially when it seems otherwise.

    There was a nun who, after a long sense of His presence, suddenly lost that sense as she confronted several reversals. She asked the Lord, I nearly succumbed, why did you leave me to contend with the darkness alone? The Lord answered, if I had left you even for a second, you would have succumbed.

    He knows what our needs are. He knows what we would like. Better than we, in fact. He sees us as we are, not as we would like to be or pretend to be. If we were to see ourselves for one instant as He sees us, which of us could stand? Our vanities and self-deceptions, our “narrative”, stripped from us even for a twinkling? 

    When the words come, pray them. When they won’t, in His grace He has even given you the words. 

    Thank the Lord.

     

    • #61
  2. lowtech redneck Coolidge
    lowtech redneck
    @lowtech redneck

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…:

    You have to lie to get a job.

    My very first ‘formal’ employment was at a Best Buy that had previously (and erroneously) accused me of shoplifting….it was difficult to keep from laughing when the interviewer asked “what was your worst shopping experience?”

    I blandly replied that I was one of those guys who never really shops unless he has something specific in mind, and thus hadn’t had any particularly bad shopping experiences .  It was apparently the right answer.

    Hang in there, Hank.

     

    • #62
  3. MARTIN WORNATH Coolidge
    MARTIN WORNATH
    @ManOfTheWest

    Hang in there, and God bless.

    • #63
  4. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    This talk of MS Office makes my blood run cold. Over the years, my life as an itinerant technologist has taught me many things. One is that the ready solution, however flawed, will be preferred. Another is that preferential attachment always prefers the worst possible thing. I once wrote a time & resource tracker for a team, in Access because they insisted. It was awful and they loved it. I had to build in a trigger to repack the DB file after every sixteen updates, so it would crash if you were on it at the time. Somehow that seemed to enhance my credibility.

    • #64
  5. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    • #65
  6. Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosopher
    @HankRhody

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    Yeah. Your poetry/verse distinction is what I was stabbing at with the phrase “when it’s good.”

    One of these days I’m going to have to look over Godel’s proof. 

    • #66
  7. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    Yeah. Your poetry/verse distinction is what I was stabbing at with the phrase “when it’s good.”

    One of these days I’m going to have to look over Godel’s proof.

    I read Nagel & Newman, not Godel’s paper. I see it’s now an e-Textbook. 

    • #67
  8. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    Yeah. Your poetry/verse distinction is what I was stabbing at with the phrase “when it’s good.”

    One of these days I’m going to have to look over Godel’s proof.

    I read Nagel & Newman, not Godel’s paper. I see it’s now an e-Textbook.

    Another book that might be worth your time is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

    • #68
  9. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Percival (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    Yeah. Your poetry/verse distinction is what I was stabbing at with the phrase “when it’s good.”

    One of these days I’m going to have to look over Godel’s proof.

    I read Nagel & Newman, not Godel’s paper. I see it’s now an e-Textbook.

    Another book that might be worth your time is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

    Everyone should read GEB at least once. I’m serious, people owe that to themselves. If you’re the sort who reads prefaces and dedications, Hofstadter’s preface to N&N describes the world of the mind that GEB came from.

    • #69
  10. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop… (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Hank Rhody, Freelance Philosop…: That’s why poetry works; when it’s good it reminds us of something we all know to be true but simply can’t grasp as human beings.

    I’d go so far as to take that to be the definition of poetry. Anything else might correctly be called verse, but to be poetry it has to tell us something we already knew. Godel proved that within a closed system of sufficient complexity to contain interesting things, there will be true things that can’t be arrived at by the rules of the system.

    Yeah. Your poetry/verse distinction is what I was stabbing at with the phrase “when it’s good.”

    One of these days I’m going to have to look over Godel’s proof.

    I read Nagel & Newman, not Godel’s paper. I see it’s now an e-Textbook.

    Another book that might be worth your time is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

    Everyone should read GEB at least once. I’m serious, people owe that to themselves. If you’re the sort who reads prefaces and dedications, Hofstadter’s preface to N&N describes the world of the mind that GEB came from.

    I highly recommend it. I read it during college.

    • #70
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