by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

For several months now, I’ve been reading that we are in what has been called a “jobless recovery.” It is one of those phrases that always seems to catch me. I understand what it means—that the economy is growing and recovering from recession—but not necessarily because jobs are being replaced and created. The people who are working are being more productive, so there is not the same need for more positions.

But there is something about the phrase that seems counterintuitive—kind of like a waterless boat launch. You really need the water in order for the boat to float. Jobs just seem so central to an economic recovery. But it is also an indicator that there are all kinds of things in our fast changing world that can seem counterintuitive at times.

Whether we have been in these straits or not, we are aware of the changes in work place. Not that long ago, people got a job someplace when they were young and stayed at that place their whole working life. But now people are much more likely to work in several places, maybe in a variety of fields. Company—and worker—loyalty is not what it once was. When times get tough—or when something better comes along—word is to not wait but to do what you need to do to take care of yourself.

In our economy there are more part time jobs and not as many full time jobs with benefits. Lately here at the church when we have had job openings we have gotten a lot more resumes than we have in the past. It is an employer’s market.

And technology also keeps changing things. If a person doesn’t need to pass my food by the scanner at the grocery store—when I can do that—then it means that one more job is not necessary. And more people now work from home. It makes it easier to not have to go into the office, but it might also make it harder to leave the job at the office.

And there is a growing expectation that we will be at work more of the time—or at least on some sort of on call basis—and that our output will be greater. With cell phones and e-mail, we can be at work all the time, or at least in touch all the time. There will come the day when Wall Street is open 24 hours a day and we can do just about anything anytime.

And you would think we would have more leisure with all of those minutes we have saved with technology, but that is not the case. Since 1990, the average American worker has added about 36 hours—almost a full week—to their yearly work load. We clock almost 2,000 hours per year, which is almost 3.5 weeks per year more than the Japanese.

If you have seen the ad for the cell phone where the man goes all over the place asking “can you hear me now?” That strikes me as an image of the way some of us are always in touch and the way that we never leave the job. We are always there. I once called a salesman and got his voice mail. He said he was on vacation but invited calls on his cell phone. That doesn’t sound much like a vacation at all.

Here in Oregon, we have claimed the dubious distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the nation for the better part of the last three years. For some, just finding a job has been impossible to the point that they have simply stopped looking. That is usually not part of what we hear in the statistics.

Just yesterday on front page of the newspaper came news that the number of jobs in the state has grown for the second straight month. But also on the same front page was the news that the Oregon Food Bank is seeing a 10 percent increase in demand during the past year and an 82 percent increase during the last seven years. I expect that a lot of those folks at the Food Bank didn’t expect to be there, just like there are a lot of people who have had no idea how difficult it would be searching for a job at this time in history.

It is easy to think that part of the American dream, in our land of plenty, is that we will find what we need. The right work will come our way. If you want something, go for it and it will happen somehow. Just look at the news from this past week. You can go from bodybuilder to action-hero actor to governor of California. Anything is possible.

But the truth is that a lot of times finding work that is rewarding and that allows us to put our values into action is not such an easy task. Whether we are employed or unemployed. Whether we own a business or work for one. Whether we are making decisions or carrying them out, the world we live in keeps changing and we are left trying to know our place in it. And in this context, the way we look at work is always in flux.

More often than not we are faced with some tradeoffs when figuring out what we’re doing with our lives:

What I have right now may not be it, but it does pay pretty well.

What about my family: is it better to have more job security even if it means less time with my children?

Is it best to stick with what I know and not to take too big a risk?

How much can I cut corners and still be ethical?

Those are the kinds of questions we might find ourselves asking. Life is hardly ever simple and there are all kinds of factors we live with as we figure out how we—or how the world will let us—be of service to the world.

We are all in different places with what we do in life.

There are people who are happily in jobs like they have been for years. They are content and can’t imagine doing anything else.

But there are also the 40-somethings who are hitting their stride professionally  and giving all that up would be a big sacrifice. But still they find themselves questioning whether they are still in the right job. The profession might be changing. The business might be changing.

There’s the twenty-something who works two or three part-time jobs. She wants a job that makes her a living, but her real passion is her music. She wants to make time for that more than anything else.

There’s the seventy something person who has been retired for a few years now and says he is busier now than he was when he was getting paid to work. He loves being of service but also has had to come to his own sense of peace about not getting paid to do his work. Still, he sometimes misses the sense of self that came with the position in the working world.

There’s the fifty-something worker who has had good professional positions in the past and has been looking for a job for a long time, without any success. This isn’t how he expected his pre-retirement years to be. He has sent out hundreds of resumes to no avail. He is at a point where he will not be able to keep up with the mortgage. The temporary jobs for a few hours a week just won’t do it.

There’s the person who has made a conscious choice to work a part time job and to have a lifestyle that is simpler. Her circumstances let her make this choice and she is happy with it.

There’s the business owner who wants to do right by her employees, but also lives with the struggle to make a profit. How do I live out my values without doing what my competitor is doing? Where is that balance in my life and in the life of my business?

The work we do—or don’t do—is fundamental to who we are. The work we do in life—whether we get money for it, or give our time volunteering—is an important part of how we see ourselves and certainly an important part of how we are seen in the larger culture. The work we do is an important way that our relationship to the larger community is made manifest. We are called to bring our gifts to the world and doing that is central to how we see ourselves and our lives. Our sense of self is very much connected to what we do.

Just think about what happens so often when someone retires, particularly men. They get depressed. When they are no longer in their position, who are they? What meaning has their work had and who will remember them?

You may have seen the movie “About Schmidt” with Jack Nicholson a few months back. Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, an insurance executive in Omaha who has just retired. He is given the send-off dinner where people say nice things about him that sound like the things they have said about everyone else who has retired.

A few weeks after retiring, Schmidt goes to see the younger man who has filled his position. Schmidt is eager to answer any questions the man has. He is eager to hear how the young man has carried on with his work. But the young man doesn’t have much time for him and assures him that he will call if any questions do come up. And you know right there that he is not going to call. As he is leaving the building, Schmidt sees the boxes of his files stacked up on the loading dock, waiting to be tossed.

What most of us want is to live lives that are real. We want to have work that reflects our values. We want to be engaged in work and not to just feel like we have this job we go to. We want what we do to have meaning. It is the sum of what we bring to the world, the way we affect the world. The way we make a difference. When we are not able to do that—and to make a living from it—our sense of self can suffer.

Hannah Arendt, who wrote “The Human Condition” has said: “We are confronted with a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Work shorn of all meaning is reduced to job.”

Getting past the expectations of self and others. Getting past the very human desires for this or that means we have to be open to what we are hearing and that is not always easy, but so important. Work is rarely always satisfying. No matter what we do, it has some down side. It brings joy and happiness, hopefully, but also has its share of frustration. But every chapter in life is a lesson and every thing we do is in service to that lifetime of learning. And through it all, we are asking ourselves what it is we are supposed to be doing with our life.

Teacher and writer Parker Palmer advises this: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen to what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

Knowing our true selves is a lifelong task. We are never finished. Palmer writes that it is not about deciding on the values we are going to live by and then doing that by sheer willpower. That, in the end, doesn’t work.

Vocation, he says, comes from listening—when we allow ourselves to really listen. It is not so much to what we think others want of us but what we are supposed to be doing in our lives. Vocation is not the goal we set for ourselves to achieve, but listening for the calling we are discerning. It is not holding ourselves to the standards that we should be living by, but living by the standards that we cannot help but live by.

It is easy to be pulled in all kinds of directions these days. We get a lot of messages about what we should be. What we consume. What we look like. Where we live. The people we hang out with. But more often than not, those messages may not be in sync with our deepest longings. The messages we get simply pull us away from that.

More often than not, I think, we know when we should or should not be doing something. It is the disease that comes in our gut. And there are ways that our bodies speak to us. Parker Palmer talks about living with depression and how that, too, was sending an important message about what he should and should not be doing in his life.

In my own life I’ve had my share of jobs and certainly in hindsight I can see how they helped to lead me to the work that has been most meaningful in my life. With every job comes learning and hopefully growth.

In college, my first job was at the lunch counter in the Greyhound Bus Depot in Milwaukee. The depot, in the middle of downtown, was a pretty dismal place. In a place that gets cold in the winter, it was the place a lot of people gathered for warmth. It was a time, in the early 80s, when homeless people where still allowed inside most of the time. I’m not so sure it would still be that way today.

There were two groups of workers at the lunch counter. The first was the permanent folks who had been there for years and knew the routine and the customers. It was their job, what they were able to get, and they were there for years, even when it became difficult to handle the job because of physical limitations. They couldn’t live without the job.

The other group of workers were students like me. We were short timers. We were there for a few months or a semester. We would be there until something else better came along.

The food concession was run by a mean-spirited man who picked on the older employees, threatening to let them go if they didn’t keep up. He told them it was easy to find other people to take their spots. They were afraid of him.

At the time, I didn’t much like going to work there and yet it was also a fascinating place in many ways. I served quite an array of people, from the mentally ill homeless folks counting out their coins to the Mormon missionaries who got off the bus every Thursday on their way to the training facility outside of town.

It was a job where I was treated extremely rudely and very kindly and I would usually experience both extremes most days. It was all part of the work. I look back on that now and I’m glad I had the experience. It certainly opened my eyes to worlds that I had not been exposed to at that point.

But it was also the only job that I have ever quit on the spot. One day someone made some threats and I realized that it was time for me to go. I was not injured but I didn’t want to stay there. It was not the place for me anymore.

But I don’t have regrets about being there. It was also a time to understand where I had power in that situation and where I didn’t. I’m a person who generally likes to help people and being in that situation early on in my life was a lesson in what I could and could not do for people. It was a lesson that there are limits to compassion. It was a lesson in knowing what I did and didn’t want to do in my life. It was a lesson that life is often not easy.

I haven’t met very many people who seem to have found the perfect fit in their working lives. More often than not it is a process of listening to what we are supposed to do. But it is also listening to what the world might be saying we shouldn’t do. Maybe there is a message in the job we have not gotten. Maybe it is what is not what is right at this time in life.

Looking to see what is in the light is important—but so is having the courage to see what is in the shadow. What is the message in what others are telling us? What does it mean for where we are supposed to go? Not everyone is supposed to be a Rosa Parks or a Bill Gates. We are supposed to be the people we are becoming. We are not supposed to become the people we ought to be if those “oughts” don’t reflect our deepest values. We are not supposed to be the people that someone else thinks we should be.

Life is a process of listening. It is a process of learning. It is a process of seeing the world around us with as much clarity as we can. We may have in our lives expectations that we place on ourselves or expectations that are placed on us by others. What we have to do is try to listen past all the distractions to what our own inner voice is telling us.

“Ask me whether what I have done has been my life,” asks the poet William Stafford.

It is important that we be able to live from the inside out, not from the outside in. That we are able to know what are the core values that we want to live from and what does that mean in the choices that we make. The decisions that any of us are faced with are seldom easy. More often than not they are questions we have to keep asking and questions we have to keep before us. But we also know when we have found that fit. Something inside lets us know it is right.

Consider what has been called the mirror test. It asks a simple question: “What would it be like to live in a world if everyone were to behave in the way I have? Would things, on the whole, be better? Or would things, on the whole, be worse? If we can ask that question with some humility and not a sense of righteousness, it might help us find our way to the answer.

Some other questions to ask: In my work life, in my volunteer life, in my parenting life, in my relationship life, what am I being called to do? What are the values I am supposed to live by? Do I live in such a way that the people I work with, the people who work for me, the people I work for, in the end have better lives? What about my family? What about the community I live in? What about the world?

Each one of us is a unique being, with a unique set of gifts, with our own set of limitations. We come with our histories, with all the defenses we have built up, with all the lessons we have learned in life. We have likes and interests. There are things we are good at and there are things we are not so good at. We have roles we come to play in the world. And that is usually not by accident. That core of who we are is part of how we make decisions. It is part of how we make our way in the world.

Last weekend I spent time in Wisconsin with my niece and her husband and their family. They have three sons, ages 6, 3 and six months. It is interesting to watch the children growing up. The oldest one loves stories, he loves to create characters and dress up and make believe. He loves to put on music and dance. He is going to be in his first play in December. His three-year-old brother, on the other hand, loves machines. He loves to explore how things work and how he can fix them. He loves anything that is physical. In fact, at wrestling, he can beat his older brother and some older cousins because he is so focused in what he is doing. For Halloween he will be the Incredible Hulk. The six-month-old doesn’t say much but does seem to be pretty easy going no matter what comes his way. He likes to look around and try to figure things out.

I hadn’t seen the boys in about a year. I loved seeing how their lives are unfolding. The two older ones do have a shared interest in water guns—but that is probably to be expected. But more often than not they seem like pretty different boys. Each different. Each unique.

Being with them was a reminder of something that I think I already knew but needed to be reminded of: We are all unique. We are all born into a set of circumstances, many of which we are not able to change. But it is our call to bring those gifts into the world and to be of service.

This is how we learn. This is how we grow. This is how we are able to see ourselves in the midst of a wild and changing universe. No matter what age. No matter what circumstance we might find ourselves in.

When I think about my little nephews, I can’t know what their lives will be like. I can’t know the changes they will see in their lifetimes. I can only imagine and have faith that they—and all of us—will find our way.

PRAYER

Great spirit, we give thanks for our lives. We give thanks for the work we do in all the chapters of our lives. We give thanks for the work done for us that we might live more fully. Help us in all of our days to embrace the possibility within us. Open us that we might embrace the light and the shadow. Open us that we might listen to that voice within. Open us that we might use our gifts to serve the world. Amen.

BENEDICTION

In all of your days may you know work that is real and bring all of your gifts in service to the world. Go now in love. Go now in peace.

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Copyright 2003, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.