Being unemployed at almost thirty is a major plan realignment for me. I am not depressed about the mere fact that I will be turning thirty a month from tomorrow. I am not missing my old job. But I am finding, as a friend who turned thirty last year told me then (you know who you are), that unsettling feelings are rising about where I thought I would be now. I don't think I would be dealing with this if I weren't unemployed, honestly. If I weren't looking for jobs, maybe I wouldn't feel so trapped in employment monotony stretching on beyond my line of sight. ("Bend in the road. There's no bend in my road, I can see it stretching straight out in front of me to the skyline." -- Katherine Brook) Or maybe I'd just be...not dealing. After all, repressing and/or ignoring difficult things is a personal specialty of mine.
I'm in mourning for my plans, my vision for my future that hasn't happened. It's easier to bury hope where it can't hurt you, easier to brush it off as a weakness or even a sin (wanting something you don't have? weak, ungrateful, selfish woman!), but I think it's more honest to mourn, and months ago I asked God to help me be more honest, even if it hurts. (Some days it seems like that was a stupid request.)
Psalm 116 balances gratitude that God hears the psalmist's voice with the recognition that the reason it is good to be heard is because life can be distressing and sorrowful. The verse I'm most familiar with is 116:15--"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His godly ones." I used to think this was meant just as a verse about how when God's people die they go to be with Him forever, free from sin and sorrow, and that delights God. While that's true, the psalm also says "I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living" (116:9).
It isn't only the physical death that is precious. The lesser deaths (often feeling greater because of the sheer number of times you pass through them) are precious to God, too. The deaths to self in the acknowledgement of brokenness and the cries for help. In surrendering dreams into the hands of God, to be returned if He chooses and maybe even asked for with regularity (to want something you don't have is to be vulnerable; hope can be a death, too). In taking God at His word and clinging to a promise as yet unrealized. In all the deaths you walk through as you walk before the Lord and cast more and more velveteen layers at His feet.
Tonight in choir we sung "Blessed Be Your Name." The lyrics aren't chipper and easy. It's a hard song, about turning all things over to God as praise even when the blessings aren't obvious and when pain saturates the offerings of praise we lift before Him. Here, in this time, this is the song of my heart. When it comes down to it, this is all I have:
You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be your name
I love the Lord, because He hears
My voice and my supplications.
Because He has inclined His ear to me,
Therefore I shall call upon Him as long as I live.
~~ Psalm 116:1-2
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