Of Cover Letters and Other Truth Telling

I'm applying for a new job because my current job is like a vampire for my professional self-confidence.  Every shred of skill, ability and attitude I have honed over the past 15 years of my professional career has almost been drained away by the past 160 hours of my work life.  I took this job because it was a timely opportunity and it was something I thought I could learn how to do, but things are not progressing as I had hoped they might.  Thankfully another opportunity came up that's a better fit for me.  And I have to get out before I lose myself in the trees instead of continuing to develop forests.  I'm good at developing forests - and apparently not so good at learning how to groom the trees.  

For me, the hardest part of applying for jobs is the cover letter.  I grew up in a culture of women where you were to be demure, you were to deflect complements, and you were not to speak highly of yourself in any way.  You were not to express your true opinion because "if you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all."  So unless you were talking about how good the Jell-O salad was, you kept your mouth shut - or you just kept shoveling food in your mouth until it was the appropriate time to get up and help with kitchen cleanup. (I've wondered on more than one occasion if this is not the root cause of many a church-lady's plumpness.) Voluntary kitchen duty for me has more than once involved "mistakenly" disposing of someone else's hot mess of a potluck dish then disavowing all knowledge about where the rest of it might have gone. 

So writing about myself in a way that places my abilities, talents and experience in a positive light has been a difficult task I have had to learn during my last semester of graduate school. I've had to shed my genteel upbringing and learn how to write about myself in ways I'm not used to.  It has helped me to put myself in the shoes of my mentors, to think about the things they would say about me and my work.  It has also helped me to let go of the control I feel like I need to have over every word I write.  The letters that have won me the interest of prospective employers have been the ones I've fired off quickly, where I've written eloquently about my passions, and the ones where I've treated my abilities and talents with (Yikes!) the most honesty.  


I still shed complements.  I still deflect glory - but only because I work with other women who can only take credit indirectly.  They're also the ones who make the best potluck dishes.  And every Southern woman worth her salt knows that silence is actually the best complement you can give a cook during any meal.  The other one is not refusing to take home leftovers. 

Shalom – Stillness of Spirit

“Cease striving (in some translations – be still) 

and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10 

Wholeness.  When you’re whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.  Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a standard too high, an undefined nirvana.  Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be. 

Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to the next level of achievement.  I started graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D.  As if writing a dissertation and getting it approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come from it, which truly is a wise thing.  Then the other mentors on my committee are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work.  It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking up the wrong-way escalator.  Each time I get up a step to the top, another appears.  My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people I work with.  I should be excited about this achievement.  But one achievement’s children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs. It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live. 

 In the middle of all of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to how I will choose to live the rest of my life.  I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important part of their lives right now.  I have other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most important thing they have ever done for themselves.  Some of my friends spend all of their mental and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging parents.  I don’t have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make me feel bad for the storyteller.  It makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.

I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas, concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others.  Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in those kinds of things.  Maybe ideas are all I need.  I have questioned for years whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to.  I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic so I could become a nun.  That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.

Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all wrong.  What if instead of achieving in order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit.  And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important.  It may come particularly for me through peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need – to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words.  And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation.  I feel myself wanting to jump off that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.

First International Church of Starbuck’s

I am friends with a group of people that includes several members of the staff of a large local church.  One recently was fired for being too outspoken about church policies he disagreed with.  One was even more recently promoted because her boss recommended her for the position after the woman retired.  The senior pastor of that church resigned a few weeks ago, the hiring committee asked the music minister to resign.  Drama, of course, ensued. 

The response from the church members I know has been strong to say the least.  One side trusts the hiring committee explicitly because “they know things about the situation better than the rest of us do.”  The other side wants to raise hell because they were not involved in the decision making process, ostensibly implying that they would have kept the people happy and found a way to work through things.  I regret to say that this is pretty typical of churches I have known.  The story line is always the same:  do one thing, someone else doesn’t like it, drama ensues. 

I know a lot of folks in conservative churches listen to talk radio – you know the kind I mean - where the radio host is intolerant of any liberal views, cuts people off mid-sentence, and is generally disrespectful of anyone who is even a shade of gray away from his own views.  I can’t stand that stuff, even though I agree with 99.9% of what is said.  I can’t stand it because of how the hosts treat the callers.  My Mamma taught me that that behavior was rude and any lady worth her salt doesn’t treat people that way. 

The sad part is that this is how disagreements are treated in the Christian circles I have been a part of.  Dissent is never treated as an opportunity for exploring a topic.  It’s treated like leprosy.  Only the leper colony is now bigger than the “pure” folks inside the walls of the city.  This is doubly bad for those who ask hard questions because the defensiveness that comes from being a minority compounds the need to draw hard and fast lines about which all members must make a public decision.  It’s Travis’s line in the sand – and I fear that those who stay inside will die a painful death like the rest of the Texan patriots at the Alamo. 

For this church to survive, and many like it, there has to be an intentional process of drawing out the conflict very carefully, skillfully moving toward reconciliation – or at least enough forgiveness that those who choose to stay can move forward together as a church body.  This might be a wonderful opportunity to learn the skill of debate – recognizing the merits and weaknesses of someone else’s argument and presenting your own before both sides come to a new understanding of the issue.  All of this is very Hegelian, and sadly most Christian folks know very little about this nor do they care to learn anything about how to practice it.  But it is likely the most important skill that the pure church insiders need to gain if they are to reach the lepers they have ostracized by their staunch foothold on their version of the truth.

 

I’m not advocating for a looser definition of truth here.  I am advocating for listening, for respect, for openness to others’ ideas & perspectives, for laying down your own pride and considering others as more important than yourself.  All of this is Biblical, yet these phrases do not characterize the way that this church has been treating its staff.  And the lepers become less and less interested in getting back into communities that treat people like they’re enemy guests on an afternoon radio show.  That’s why I think I’ll stay a leper and hang out with the other lepers for a while longer at Starbuck’s on Sunday mornings. The coffee's better there, anyway.  

There's a ditch on both sides of the road

As a kid, I used to ride in our giant 1970's van with my brothers and my mom out to the field to take my Dad lunch when he was plowing.  Most of our land is contiguous to our homestead, but we have one place that is 8 miles or so east down a long, straight country road.  One day, instead of driving our normal route into the field through the pasture, we needed to drop the lunch and head to town (oh, glorious day!), so we pulled off the road to wait for Dad to circle back around in the tractor. 

Little did we know that the very tall weeds there obscured a deep (very deep) drainage ditch.  Now, in the Texas Panhandle these are not full of weeds or water very often, but this was a wet year, so it had grown up with weeds which had hidden how deep and dangerous it was.  So Mom pulls off to the side of the road and within the blink of an eye the giant 1970's van was teetering on the edge of disaster, hanging from a cliff over a drainage ditch.  Luckily, my Mom's panic was allayed by a man driving by who took to rescue us from certain death (it was only three feet down).  By the time the tractor made it's way around the field, Dad reminded Mom that of course there was indeed a culvert there that had always been there - didn't she remember? This did not please her.

Generally ditches are used in one of two cases: either to avoid something bad  (say, a car passing another car in oncoming traffic and they cut it a little close) or after something bad has already happened (when there are flashing lights behind you and the man in the Ray-Bans asks you to pull over).  I almost had a convergence of these two circumstances south of Valley Mills, pulling over to let others pass me and almost hitting a highway patrolman who had someone pulled over in the ditch right in front of me. I think we both saw our lives flash before our eyes that day.

I say this sometimes when I refer to problems with extremes.  There are fundamentalists on both sides of all issues.  More often than not, they have more in common with each other than anyone in the middle.  There are problems with almost every area of human life related to extreme overuse and extreme underuse of our bodies, nutrition, work, liesure,....  Exercising too much leads to injury.  Exercising too little leads to heart problems.  Eating too little leads to digestive problems.  Eating too much leads to obesity.  Working too much leads to relational dysfunction.  Working too little leads to poverty.  Too much free time results in bad choices related to boredom.  Too little free time makes you unavailable for spontaneous fun.  When the issue of extremes comes up, I always say "There's a ditch on both sides of the road."  More often than not, people will stop and say, "Yeah, that's true!" 

The thing with life on extreme terms is that you can only be there for so long before the drainage culvert of death catches up to you.  That's when you're going to need someone to swoop in to rescue you.  When that happens, I hope your road is easy to get back on and someone kind heps you back to the middle.