Grateful For Commas

I lost my job last week. No way, you say. Unfortunately, yes way. Simply put, our company went through an acquisition and the new organization doesn’t have room for everyone. To be fair, I was offered to stay on for the remainder of the year and as well as an equitable severance package.

I will miss my friends, which includes both my colleagues and clients. I’m in the telecommunications field, and there are no two carriers alike which in turn has made my job challenging and interesting both from a technical and business perspective. The variety of people I’ve met has taught me valuable lessons in working with different personalities and abilities. I’ve had to become more patient, knowing when to push and when to back off, as not everything happens in the way or timeframe I always want them to.

The telecom industry has been and continues to be a male-dominated field. I say that strictly from a gender perspective. Early on in my career I took an advanced training class in a specific area of technology, and I was the lone female. More recently I spoke to a group of clients at one of our user group meetings, and I was once again the only woman. Countless times I’ve been in meetings or spoken to larger audiences, the percentage of women has rarely risen above 1%.

Though the ratios continue to give the Equal Employment folks nightmares, I’ve never been treated any differently than my male counterparts – including career advancement as well as compensation. In fact when I left a previous position, I was fairly certain I was the highest compensated engineer, male or female, out of more than 300 engineers in our organization. I’ve worked as hard as my male counterparts to earn high marks among my peers and have what I’ve affectionately termed “good coin” - credibility - with all my clients. Clearly it’s been a fun and rewarding ride.

The equity ownership I had in my company is now defunct, a logical outcome of being acquired in the current economic climate. Last week I was joking with my stepmom that all 262,000 shares I owned would be worth more now as 262,000 squares of toilet paper :). We lightly commiserated about our investments and I noted that while my chances of accumulating some wealth through company ownership have been put on hold, at least our investments, though down, still have decimal points and more importantly commas behind them.

Sitting at dinner that night another thought bubbled up in my mind. If a person’s life is seen as a sentence, it would seem that each chapter or major change in life could be considered a comma, marked by the inevitable period or death at the end. In a sense, I consider losing my job to be a comma - a pause or break in the sentence of my life, not at all The End.

I didn’t always feel this way. I’ve lost a job before and at the time it indeed felt like a death. After the initial shock and subsequent sobbing was over with, I fell into a state of apathy as if nothing else mattered but the roots I had put down in my job that had been suddenly and involuntarily pulled up. I had lived a conservative lifestyle, well within my means, so it was not a money thing. Rather, I had to admit that nearly my entire identity was wrapped up in my job and to lose it so abruptly meant I lost who I was as well. No comma for me back then; though my body continued to live, it clearly felt like a period that signaled the end of my sentence or value as a person.

These days I’ve come to understand that one must live for a cause greater than oneself. Though I gain great joy from cultivating and using the wonderful gifts and talents I’ve been given, they are no longer the foundation of who I am. My view has shifted considerably from “playing Gameboy sittin’ in the middle of the Grand Canyon” (as Steven Curtis Chapman so cleverly sings :)) to deriving my identity from the One who made the Grand Canyon.

If I get wrapped up in the penalties of losing my job, I think about God who gave up His rightful position in heaven and pierced our world in the form of Jesus Christ - a man who lived a perfect and sinless life, and in the end was abandoned by his friends, unjustly accused, and finally died a humiliating and excruciating death – all to pay a debt I could not pay on my own. No job loss compares to that kind of love - “…that a man would lay down his life for his friends…” (John 15:13)

Believing this in my heart stretches my perspective on life well beyond the 80-something years I may spend in this body. The implications are huge. It turns not only a job loss but my entire life into a comma. Though the body I Iive in today will someday perish, my life is far from over – eternity stretches out before me, wildly more beautiful than I could possibly imagine, so that even bodily death becomes not a period but just another comma.

In all our job losses, rollercoaster investments, and even squares of toilet paper, I’m grateful for commas :).