The Job Application Tab I've Had Open for Six Weeks and Still Haven't Submitted
The Job Application Tab I've Had Open for Six Weeks and Still Haven't Submitted
I found the posting on a Tuesday night in September, a warehouse supervisor job twenty minutes from my house, paying more than what I make now, and I filled out the first three pages without much trouble. Name, address, work history, the easy parts. Then I got to the question I always get to, the one asking me to explain any gaps in employment, and I have sat on that same page for six weeks now, the cursor blinking in a text box I cannot make myself finish. I have opened that tab probably forty times since. I read over what little I had typed, delete a sentence, retype a shorter one, and close the laptop again without hitting submit. Three other applications from that same week got finished and sent and came back with the kind of polite rejection that stops stinging after the second one. This one I have not even let them see enough of me to reject.
I am three years sober, and I used to think discouragement only showed up after you had actually tried and failed enough times to earn it. What that blinking cursor has taught me is that discouragement can set in before the trying ever really starts, quietly convincing a man that finishing the form is pointless because he already knows, somehow, exactly how the story ends. I have talked myself out of submitting a simple application with the same tired certainty I used to talk myself into one more drink, telling myself I already knew how that night would go too, and being wrong about that just as often as I am probably wrong about this.
Scripture does not treat discouragement as some rare spiritual failure reserved for the weak. The men rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem had been at it for weeks, half of them doing real labor with the other half standing guard, and their own report of themselves was not pretty. "Then Judah said, 'The strength of the laborers is failing, and there is so much rubbish that we are not able to build the wall'" (Nehemiah 4:10, NKJV). Failing strength and a pile of rubbish too big to clear, that is not a complaint from men who never started. That is a report from men who had already been building for a month and had every reason, by their own accounting, to believe the wall would never get finished. My gap-in-employment box is a small pile of rubbish next to that wall, and some days it still feels just as impossible to clear.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten that application submitted. I can tell myself accurately that honesty on a form is the right thing to do, that plenty of companies hire men with a record if the rest of the file is strong enough, that the worst thing that happens is another polite no. Every sentence is true, and none of it has moved my thumb to the submit button, because the problem sitting on that page was never really about wording. It was about a man who has decided, ahead of any actual answer, that he already knows the verdict and would rather not hear it said out loud. The writer of Hebrews names the exact drift I keep falling into. "For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls" (Hebrews 12:3, NKJV). Weary and discouraged in the soul, not just the schedule. That is a deeper tiredness than six weeks of an open tab should produce, and it told me the real fight was never on that page at all.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit gives that my own grit has never been able to supply on its own. Paul does not promise the Galatians an easier field to work in before he tells them to keep working it. "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart" (Galatians 6:9, NKJV). In due season, not on my six-week deadline, and not by might or main force either. Paul tells the Ephesians plainly where the actual strength for that kind of endurance comes from, and it was never going to be manufactured by a man staring harder at a blinking cursor. He prays "that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man" (Ephesians 3:16, NKJV). Strengthened in the inner man, which is precisely the part of me that kept closing the laptop, not the part that knows how to type a paragraph about a prison sentence.
David had real enemies circling him when he wrote the words I needed on that sixth week, and he did not pretend the fear was not real before he answered it. "I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living" (Psalm 27:13, NKJV), and then he gives the actual instruction instead of just the feeling. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). Paul describes what that strengthening actually looks like from the outside, lived out under real pressure far heavier than a job form. "We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4:8-9, NKJV). Not forsaken is the phrase my own discouragement never wants me to remember, because discouragement survives by convincing me I am facing the rubbish pile alone.
I filled in that box tonight, honestly, in three plain sentences I am not proud of and not ashamed of either, and I hit submit before I could talk myself out of it again. I do not know yet what will come back. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which cursor you have been staring at, which form or phone call or appointment you keep almost finishing and then closing instead, convinced you already know how it ends. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you feeling strong enough to finish it on your own strength, and He has told you Himself what He does for a man standing in front of a wall that looks too big to build. "And the LORD, He is the One who goes before you. He will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be dismayed" (Deuteronomy 31:8, NKJV). He goes before you, and He will never leave you standing there alone with the rubbish still piled at your feet.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Nehemiah 4:10; Hebrews 12:3; Galatians 6:9; Ephesians 3:16; Psalm 27:13-14; 2 Corinthians 4:8-9; Deuteronomy 31:8.
I found the posting on a Tuesday night in September, a warehouse supervisor job twenty minutes from my house, paying more than what I make now, and I filled out the first three pages without much trouble. Name, address, work history, the easy parts. Then I got to the question I always get to, the one asking me to explain any gaps in employment, and I have sat on that same page for six weeks now, the cursor blinking in a text box I cannot make myself finish. I have opened that tab probably forty times since. I read over what little I had typed, delete a sentence, retype a shorter one, and close the laptop again without hitting submit. Three other applications from that same week got finished and sent and came back with the kind of polite rejection that stops stinging after the second one. This one I have not even let them see enough of me to reject.
I am three years sober, and I used to think discouragement only showed up after you had actually tried and failed enough times to earn it. What that blinking cursor has taught me is that discouragement can set in before the trying ever really starts, quietly convincing a man that finishing the form is pointless because he already knows, somehow, exactly how the story ends. I have talked myself out of submitting a simple application with the same tired certainty I used to talk myself into one more drink, telling myself I already knew how that night would go too, and being wrong about that just as often as I am probably wrong about this.
Scripture does not treat discouragement as some rare spiritual failure reserved for the weak. The men rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem had been at it for weeks, half of them doing real labor with the other half standing guard, and their own report of themselves was not pretty. "Then Judah said, 'The strength of the laborers is failing, and there is so much rubbish that we are not able to build the wall'" (Nehemiah 4:10, NKJV). Failing strength and a pile of rubbish too big to clear, that is not a complaint from men who never started. That is a report from men who had already been building for a month and had every reason, by their own accounting, to believe the wall would never get finished. My gap-in-employment box is a small pile of rubbish next to that wall, and some days it still feels just as impossible to clear.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten that application submitted. I can tell myself accurately that honesty on a form is the right thing to do, that plenty of companies hire men with a record if the rest of the file is strong enough, that the worst thing that happens is another polite no. Every sentence is true, and none of it has moved my thumb to the submit button, because the problem sitting on that page was never really about wording. It was about a man who has decided, ahead of any actual answer, that he already knows the verdict and would rather not hear it said out loud. The writer of Hebrews names the exact drift I keep falling into. "For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls" (Hebrews 12:3, NKJV). Weary and discouraged in the soul, not just the schedule. That is a deeper tiredness than six weeks of an open tab should produce, and it told me the real fight was never on that page at all.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit gives that my own grit has never been able to supply on its own. Paul does not promise the Galatians an easier field to work in before he tells them to keep working it. "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart" (Galatians 6:9, NKJV). In due season, not on my six-week deadline, and not by might or main force either. Paul tells the Ephesians plainly where the actual strength for that kind of endurance comes from, and it was never going to be manufactured by a man staring harder at a blinking cursor. He prays "that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man" (Ephesians 3:16, NKJV). Strengthened in the inner man, which is precisely the part of me that kept closing the laptop, not the part that knows how to type a paragraph about a prison sentence.
David had real enemies circling him when he wrote the words I needed on that sixth week, and he did not pretend the fear was not real before he answered it. "I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living" (Psalm 27:13, NKJV), and then he gives the actual instruction instead of just the feeling. "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). Paul describes what that strengthening actually looks like from the outside, lived out under real pressure far heavier than a job form. "We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4:8-9, NKJV). Not forsaken is the phrase my own discouragement never wants me to remember, because discouragement survives by convincing me I am facing the rubbish pile alone.
I filled in that box tonight, honestly, in three plain sentences I am not proud of and not ashamed of either, and I hit submit before I could talk myself out of it again. I do not know yet what will come back. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which cursor you have been staring at, which form or phone call or appointment you keep almost finishing and then closing instead, convinced you already know how it ends. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you feeling strong enough to finish it on your own strength, and He has told you Himself what He does for a man standing in front of a wall that looks too big to build. "And the LORD, He is the One who goes before you. He will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be dismayed" (Deuteronomy 31:8, NKJV). He goes before you, and He will never leave you standing there alone with the rubbish still piled at your feet.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Nehemiah 4:10; Hebrews 12:3; Galatians 6:9; Ephesians 3:16; Psalm 27:13-14; 2 Corinthians 4:8-9; Deuteronomy 31:8.
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