on becoming me

It's hard to know who I am as a non-working person.  I've let my work define me for most of my life.  This is a spiritual challenge now--to be who I am without an institution or career defining me.  I have visions of the rest of my life whithering as I wonder where the person I was went.  And yet I am beginning to recognize that I was not fully realized in what I was doing.  To work and survive in an institution or business everyone has to engage in tasks that aren't a good fit and try to master new skills as the work requires.  I think bosses think of this as loyalty. At times this "stepping up to the opportunity" is energizing, at times distressing.  It challenges the worker to "upgrade" her/himself continually and at a continually rapid pace. I wonder though what it does to our spirits. Now I hear that as the economy shrinks and the unemployed rate grows workers who still have jobs are required to pick up more and more work of colleagues who were formerly working beside them.  Are we at such a state that to work is to be unhappily over-worked and/or anxiously grateful that you have a job, such as it is?  What happened to fulfillment and satisfaction in the workplace?

Being underemployed is giving me a opportunity to allow my values to guide my decisions and identity.  At times I am tempted to send my resume for a position that doesn't quite or at all fit my sense of myself.  I do it because of thoughts like, "It will be good practice if I get an interview" or "Maybe I can find a way to define this job as my own."  Neither of these thoughts gets me past the online application.  I am getting all kinds of email advise from the online sites where I have gone to search for position openings.  Frankly, this advise makes me feel worse because it's proposes the formulaic advise that really doesn't seem to take into account my specialty, chaplaincy.  One such emailer advised that I use fewer passive verbs such as "provided" and instead list my accomplishments.  I'm sure most employers would be impressed if I wrote in my resume that I "saved 100 souls last year" and "laid hands on and healed 20 people each month."  The trouble is I am not applying for televangelist of the year. 

I think that I shall let my values and passions be my guides.  They communicate pretty clearly who I am and the gifts I bring to the table.  I think I'll also try to cultivate some patience for the employer who will recognize and apprecisate those gifts.  In the mean times without my institutional constrictions to bind me maybe I'll discover more gifts and values of the "I AM" that I am becoming.