The Job I Could Not Stay In

You wrote it in the car park on your phone and you sent it before you could reread it, which is the only reason it got sent.

Seven months ago.

You are not going to describe the place here. You know what it was. Two people who worked there have since left as well, which is a fact you keep returning to at about two in the morning, because it is the only external evidence you have that you were not simply weak.

Everybody was supportive at the time. Your sister said good. Your friend said you look better already, and you did.

For about a month it was the right decision in the plainest possible way. You slept. You stopped waking at four.

And then applications, and nothing, and more applications, and a few interviews that came to nothing, and now it is seven months and the sleeping has stopped again, and the thing waking you at two is not the old place any more.

It is a sentence that arrived in about month five, and it goes: you did this to yourself.

The reason given in the verse is not performance

There is a line in Psalm 18 tucked between a rescue and a long description of God's help.

He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.Psalm 18:19

Two things in it worth stopping on.

A large place. The image is of someone who has been in a narrow spot, a place with no room to turn, being brought out into somewhere with space. That is exactly what leaving felt like for about a month.

And then the reason. Because he delighted in me. Not because David had performed, or timed it well, or made the right strategic call. The reason offered for the whole rescue is God's disposition toward the person.

That matters at two in the morning in month seven, because the sentence keeping you awake assumes God's help is tied to whether the decision was correct.

You are delighted in, and the delight was never conditional on your judgement. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says He delivered me because He delighted in me, Psalm 18:19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and sets it down in a dark room at two.

A right decision and a hard outcome are two different things

Here is the reasoning that arrived in month five, and it needs taking apart.

It goes: if leaving had been right, something would have come by now. Nothing has come. Therefore leaving was wrong. Therefore this is my own doing.

Every step of that is an inference and not one of them is Scripture.

Outcomes do not audit decisions. If they did, half the Bible would be a record of mistakes. Joseph is right to refuse and goes to prison for it. Paul is right to go to Jerusalem and is arrested. Nowhere does Scripture treat a hard stretch afterwards as a verdict on the step that preceded it.

You are not looking at evidence, you are looking at seven months. Scripture says a man's goings are of the Lord, how can a man then understand his own way, Proverbs 20:24, and the Holy Spirit does not settle whether a decision was right by counting the weeks after it.

Nothing here is advice

Not one word of this is about the search.

I do not know your field, your town, or the seven months you have already spent in it. Nobody outside that has any business suggesting an approach, and there is a real cruelty in implying that better technique would have produced something by now.

So nothing here reads seven months as a report on your effort. Scripture never reads a shut door that way, Psalm 18:19, and the Holy Spirit is not the voice telling somebody at two in the morning that they should have been cleverer.

You have not been overlooked since the car park. That was true in the first good month and it is true now.

And leaving was allowed

One more thing, and it is the one I would say most firmly.

You were allowed to leave. A person is allowed to leave a place that is doing them harm. That is not a failure of endurance, it is not a lack of faith, and there is no verse anywhere that requires somebody to stay somewhere that is grinding them down in order to prove something.

Two other people have left since. You are not required to use that as evidence, and I notice that you have been, at two in the morning, because you have not felt allowed to simply say the place was bad. Scripture never demanded that a person stay somewhere that was grinding them down, Psalm 18:19, and the Holy Spirit was not the voice keeping you there.

You are allowed to say it.

You are not the author of these seven months. Scripture says the Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, Psalm 18:2, and the Holy Spirit has been the one holding a person who is presently blaming themselves for their own rescue.