Overcoming the shame that surrounds unemployment

I still have residues of shame inside me, going back to early 2021 when I quit my job and spent that one year out of formal employment. Part of it is from the way I handled myself during that season and the other part is from the way the people around me received my then-new reality, that is, mostly negatively.

Every bad decision that I could muster at that time, I made, as I fumbled helplessly trying to make sense of the dark, new world that I now found myself in. Despite everything, in that melée, I also stumbled upon many good choices and some excellent ones too. That season shaped my life and God has redeemed it in ways I am still pleasantly discovering.

From that time, God has brought people to me who are in between jobs, that I have been able to walk with until they find work again. They have told me that having me alongside them made the experience easier to bear, and I could not be more excited about how God truly uses our experiences to guide others along when they encounter similar situations to what used to be ours.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of shame that surrounds unemployment and the indignity over it creates lasting scars.

Now with the advantage of perspective, I look back and see that all of the fear that surrounds unemployment is far more exaggerated than the actual reality of the situation. Personally, both the threat of unemployment and unemployment itself has long lost a hold of me, but I know that unemployment is one of Satan’s most effective tools to break, maul, and crush the spirit of a person possibly beyond recovery.

When I look back at my thought process during that season, it is extremely shocking to me the falsehoods I carried about myself and about that season. It did not matter that my reasons to quit were ethical; that quitting was the right decision for me to make, and that it was an absolute flex to uphold my values and standard of work ethic above money and the threat of my own survival.

Yet, I felt stupid, utterly stupid when I sat alone with myself. I blamed myself for having the courage to do the right, unpopular thing. It was not long before I lost that battle in my mind. I become disillusioned with life, fellow Christian believers, and with God Himself. I wondered how I could love and serve God so genuinely and wholeheartedly and yet still suffer such untold pain. I could bear to suffer for my own wrongs but to suffer for doing things right? That had never registered in my mind. That is how I fell into the trap of “everyone is doing it” and abandoned all pretences of following God- personal or public.

Except that that was a lie and no, not “everyone is doing it.” The journey of coming to the place where I choose to follow God no matter what -friends, acceptance, approval, being cool, intelligent, popular all be damned- has been long and arduous. Yet, my heart has found its way back home and I absolutely love it here.

Here is my point: I have a solid experience with unemployment which I do not share about often and much less publicly because it scratches some old wounds and bruises my self-esteem in more ways than I like. Because of that, I only ever share this within the context of deep, intimate friendships to help those for whom their season of unemployment has become excruciatingly unbearable.

Yet, my spirit has been tugging at me relentlessly to share this and I am inclined to obey God more than protect my feelings.

Now, listen. If you are in between jobs right now and your mind is a raging storm of confusion and pain, please know that you are not alone. You are not useless. You are not a failure. That is a lie straight from the pits of hell. Your friends who are avoiding you right now? I hope you lose them forever so that you can hear more voices like mine. Listen to me. I love God. I trust Him completely. I commune with Him regularly- and He has told me to tell you, that everything is okay. He is completely aware of everything that is going on. Do not despair.

I implore you, further: do not let this season of unemployment push you to make bad decisions that you would not, ordinarily. No, not everyone is doing it. Unemployment does not kill. It may feel like it does, but it does not.

You will surely live to see a brighter day. On this word, I stake my own hand and my confidence of this is based on the fact that the God who loves you completely, says that He will never leave you nor forsake you.

Believe Him.

I was unemployed when I took this picture in mid-2021.