Settling In for the Holiday

Graduation is Thursday. I will get to be called "Doctor" officially, although some people have been calling me that already.

I have started to get signals that unless something remarkable happens, there is little future for me at the hospital. I started to look for other jobs.

December 2008 is a heck of a time to start looking for jobs. There is a recession going on.

I am mindful of my sales job that I held in 1991. I had a file full of leads that had told me in August to call them back in December. There was a recession in 1991 too.

I thought surely out of all those leads I was going to close some sales. I went though the file in no time. They all delayed me again.

I was desperately looking for a steady job. Sure I had the school bus company I was driving for, but I was a recent masters degree graduate and I was of the opinion that surely I would get something by the virtue of my having moved on beyond college. Surely, since I was a seminary graduate, I was going to get hired by a church. I was naive.

At that time in history, nothing was going to move. The days and weeks crept by slowly. I was not going to get anything immediately. September, 1991 through June, 1992 was one of the slowest time periods in my life. There were no job openings when I thought I needed one. I was suffering.

After a church committee in Columbia, Missouri sent me an insensitive shallow letter, I decided I was going to head to Social Work school. Church personnel committees were too sloppy for me to tolerate. I decided that I was not called to parish ministry.

That was a time of humility. I am mindful of that time now that I have made it to the Ph.D. level. I could still be a line-level social worker in one year from now.

There was one other time in November, 1999 when I decided to look for a new job after I felt abused at a mental health agency by an administrator. It took me five months before I found another job. I started looking in December.

The good news was that those times both passed. The economy had improved, and then there was a recession again in 2000-2002 after the "Dot-Com Bubble." The economy improved again.

I am quite sure that few employers are hiring in December. They are wrapping up the calendar year. They are all evaluating their budgets as to whether or not they are going to hire. They are putting things off until after Christmas. It is the way of organizational function in America. For those of us looking, we are now waiting.

Waiting is more painful when all the world can do is talk about hard times. It really is a heck of a time when you are in a position you do not want to be in and nothing good seems to be happening. Things are slow and things seem larger than life.

That is the reality. This is the time to be settling in. Settling in is difficult. But I think that is what is called for right now.

How do we settle in? First, expect things to move slower. Move slower yourself--not everything has to get done today. Discover other things than what needs to be purchased with money.

Read about history and the past--people made it through these times in the past. Most people did not sink--they pressed on. I can too.