I remember the balloon of panic that swelled in my chest, a new husband, a new father, and newly unemployed. Life in the rolling green space of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County was in many ways ideal. But if your last name was not Dutch and you had not grown up farming with mules, finding a job was like entering planting season without seed to scatter.  

Being without a job meant more to me than losing a source of income. In America, where new relationships typically begin with the question, “what do you do?” losing a job also meant losing my identity. Americans have a uniquely self-reliant view of work. We love the image of the “up from poverty” hero, a person of self-reliance who will be the next Donald Trump . . . uh, well, maybe not him, since he is back in bankruptcy court. Again. But somebody handsome and dashing, with a Disneyesque story.  

So, as part of American folklore, losing a job means you now have the opportunity to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” But as Walter Kirn wrote in last week’s New York Times Magazine, “For true believers in the gospel of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, the notion that bootstraps sometimes snap – and occasionally in great numbers, simultaneously – is destabilizing and bewildering.”  Last week, it was reported that a total of 5.7 million jobs have now been lost since the start of the recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate in the United States hit a 26-year high after another half a million jobs were lost last month. The Department of Labor reported that the unemployment rate now rested at 8.9% in April from 8.5% the previous month, marking the highest level since September 1983. 

Those numbers are confounding. And the numbers don’t begin to add up to the pain and struggle in the lives the numbers represent. The American lie is, as Kirn writes, that the “success people have is determined by who they are – or rather, who they aren’t – and not by circumstances.” You know the old adage, the successful striver keeps going, never giving up. The lazy loser gives up, goes home, and eventually shows up as a flash of stupidity on Cops.

So I’m just wondering. How do I help? What do I say to a friend who lost his job? I want to push back at the American bootstrap nonsense that makes it almost shameful to be out of work. I need to bridge the gap somehow, reminding people that their work, or lack of, does not define them. We are all so much more than what we do. God intended for our work to give glory to him, not to define our place in society.