The Last to Go

The career was the last identity standing. Then it wasn't.

The days after were a blur.

My normal was 8:30am school drop-off, home by 8:45, fresh cup of coffee, sit down, start the day. The pings from my team. The catching up. The rhythm of it.

Gone.

I sat in the quiet office in my home with no pings, no purpose, no direction. Just the question I didn’t know how to answer yet.

Who am I?

Loser is what I felt like. I couldn’t put down the reminders, the people I might never talk to again. The loyalty. The ten years. Erased. No warning. No notice.

How dare they.

Getting laid off hurts. It claws at your ego. It creates doubt. It leaves you asking, what did I do wrong?

The anger came first. Then the rejection settled in. And then the strongholds showed up, the ones that had been waiting.

My inner worst critic, gleeful, taking full advantage of the self-worth I had allowed my career to carry. That was gone now. Distant memory.

This is who you really are.

I had heard of a wilderness season. I thought I understood dying to self.

For eight months they had been falling off. One by one, the identities stripped away after I surrendered. I watched them go. But this one, the career, ten years, no notice, no warning, taken, not surrendered on my terms.

The most brutal one yet.

Just God’s timing.

Not mine.

Okay God. What now?

Trust. Wait. One foot in front of the other.

Breathe.

One of my Christian pillars told me to start dreaming again. A clean slate. An opportunity to start over.

But I didn’t feel like dreaming. I felt like hiding.

So here I sit asking my 45-year-old self… what do I want to be when I grow up?

I knew He hadn’t brought me this far to drop me. I knew it. But knowing something in your head and feeling it in your body are two different worlds. And I was living in the gap between them.

The flesh was winning. Every morning I woke up and had to choose, and most mornings, the strongholds got there first.

And underneath all of it, quieter than the anger, quieter than the rejection, was the question I was most afraid to ask out loud.

Am I worth the blessing? Would He actually use me?

I’m living in the Saturday. The in-between. Good Friday happened. The Resurrection is coming. I know that. I believe that.

But that time isn’t now.

The whisper keeps getting louder. The more I try to drown it out, the louder it gets. A pull to write about raw perseverance, the mess where He meets us, The Holy Grit. A life of bad decisions, trials, sufferings, miracles, and blessings, told with no filter. Not wrapped up in a pretty bow.

So I’m stepping out in faith.

And I wait.

Because the truth is, this isn’t the first time God showed up before I understood what He was doing.

- No one is too lost to be saved.