Work & Vocation
I keep applying and keep getting rejected, and I am starting to think nothing will ever come of it. How do I stay encouraged?
“I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
The psalm looks back on a rescue from what the writer calls a pit of destruction and miry clay: not a dramatic disaster but a slow sinking, the sort where every attempt to climb out only puts you deeper. The rescue described is not instant either. He waited patiently first, so the psalm comes from someone who knows what waiting feels like.
“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”
Paul writes to churches worn down by conflict and pressure, urging them not to give up on doing good before the harvest comes. He assumes discouragement is the ordinary risk of a long effort rather than evidence of failure. The phrase about due season quietly admits that the timing is not ours, which is exactly the part that hurts in a long search.
A path forward
Ask two employers who rejected you for one line of specific feedback. Some will not answer, and the ones who do will tell you more than fifty further applications would.
Keep a list of what you have done each week rather than what you have won. Job hunting has almost no wins, so measure effort or you will conclude you are failing.
Ask someone to pray with you out loud on the morning of an interview. Walking into the room carrying somebody else's prayer changes how you sit in it.
Closing verse
“My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.”
- Psalm 31:15
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