I share with you part of a letter to a young person looking for her first major job and struggling with the stress and challenge of it all.

She had been rejected following an interview, and life is filled with such lessons:

This kind of thing can not only be disappointing, it can also be confusing and disrupting.

I know your take on the interview was that you did pretty well, and MY take on your answers was that you did pretty well.

The real issue is what the interviewers were actually looking for.

Unlike a REAL test that you may have taken in school, where there really IS a right and a wrong answer ? objectively ? in this case there could be several right answers objectively but only one right answer subjectively (where "subjectively" means the answer they as a group had already decided on).

So, giving yourself an F in this case is not the same as getting an F for some test you may have taken in school.

Then, as you have said, there is the issue of God's working in your life.

That job interview was not a waste. Some people would look at what happened, and they would say, "It wasn't God's will for her to get the job."

Then, was it God's will for you to apply for that job?

Some would say you had wasted your time, made a mistake, not discerned God's will for your life and squandered your time.

You not only got an F on the interview, you got an F in discerning God's will!

What I tend to think is that you are squarely in the middle of God's will at all times ? if you trust Him.

Life is a growth process. People often talk about growth and change.

Psychologists have theories of change that guide the changes they try to achieve in the lives of their clients.

They connect the dots of developmental episodes and make interpretations designed to tell people "why" they do such and such. Others try to re-arrange the way a person thinks, believing that everything else ? feelings and actions ? will follow. Still others have abandoned any over arching theory of change; they look to isolated research studies, usually carried out under sterile conditions as if in some kind of clean room where nothing might contaminate the variables in question, and they measure shifts and degrees of variance from what would happen by chance.

Then they say change can take place if you follow the exact actions, under the exact conditions present in the sterile clean room.

The only problem is that there IS no such clean room in real life where all of us actually live.

Life is just too complex for that.

I tend to think that we get to the next thing by standing firmly, with all we are, on the current thing.

When you take a step, you cannot put a foot down somewhere else without pushing off from where you happen to be.

We change by maximising the here and now and living fully in the present.

It seems to me that that is what you were doing all the way along with this job application and interview process.

People talk about change and growth, but few people are willing to go through the hard work of changing and growing.

So, here you are, and I imagine you are feeling pain.

That's part of the current situation too.

Should you run away from the pain or try to block it out in some way?

It may be counter intuitive, but I tend to think it more helpful to let yourself experience the pain as well, since that is also part of the current moment. Trust God still.

He is in that moment with you. All of life can be understood as this kind of process.

The larger purpose is to grow you as a person, to increase your capacity for relationship (with Him and with other people), to enjoy your partnership with divinity, to facilitate your ability to function as a citizen of the Kingdom of God.