December 5th, 2008
I am like a growing number of Americans. I am unemployed. If you account for also the underemployed Americans in today’s economy I would have to guess that we make up a majority of the population.
I am a college graduate; I even have a master’s degree. It just turns out that I graduated 6 months into a recession with a series of degrees that prepare me for work outside of my field about as much as a taxi driver is prepared to perform open heart surgery. Now, 6 months after graduation I continue to look for work with very little hope or prospects.
The news this morning was oddly comforting. They announced that last month 533,000 jobs were cut from the economy. The month before 290,000 were cut and the month before that 320,000 were cut. Why is this comforting you might ask, well, simply put it helped me realize that I am not alone in this misery. In the passed 11 months nearly 2 million jobs have been lost. When you think about that this is really significant. In a year we have lost jobs. More people retire than enter the job market every year and yet still we are cutting jobs. The people who enter the job market are right now having to compete with years of experience and maturity. Young folk like me who are getting ready to start a real life and attempt to contribute are finding it impossible to get a foot in the door unless we have connections from our parents, friends, or college internships.
At the same time the news this morning also revealed that $9 billion of the bailout package has been lost, theoretically it will recover in time, but since the money was placed in stocks by the government, 9 billion has been lost. That is incredible. At times I wonder if instead of the government paying to bailout corporations maybe they should focus on bailing out individuals. If instead of putting money into saying bad business models they instead helped Americans make their payments and earn extra money to spend, I think the economy would be in a better place. If I had extra money, yes I would be using it for basic survival and paying off my massive student loan debt, but I would also be putting some of that money into the stock market and thus invest in the future. I think many Americans would put some money into the Stock Market if they had money to put in. We do realize that right now is the perfect time to buy to make money in the future, its just that we have no money to invest, every cent goes into daily living.
I am a trained theologian. I’ve been taught the importance of knowing your audience, the world around you, the context, and from that find the words God speaks to the community. I’ve wondered really what my community is, in some ways I wonder if my inability to find a job, my fiscal struggles and my fears and feelings of inadequacies are in some way a gift from God, that I am only now starting to realize. What is the context in which I am entering into the world? It is a context of financial meltdown, unemployment, and fear. God, is teaching me how and who I am responsible by making me one amongst the many. But, in all this I am learning what it means to be a Christian in recession, maybe a Christian in depression. In part what I am learning is how to be a Christian and how to be a theologian in the trenches rather than writing about what I haven’t and can not ever experience for myself.
I trust that there is a reason behind all this struggle that we are now facing. I believe that sometime, after it has all passed we will come to a realization of why the suffering was necessary. But most importantly even in the face of immense meaninglessness I trust that beyond the abyss there really is meaning and purpose. God has a direction, a purpose, and a plan for each of us and as a collective. It might be that as a culture we have become to money and credit oriented and this is the wake up call to find what is really most essential, it might just be proof that we have made wealth our god and ignored the source. In time we will discover meaning, until then we continue on in the face of fear.
May God be with you.
Yours, EWHP
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