For the past year or so, my parents and I have been engaged in what you might call a battle of wills over me going out and finding a job during the summer. Last summer, it didn't happen, and this upset them a great deal. It ended up upsetting me as well, because I then had to take a job that often felt more like scraping a cheese grater against my head than a task for which I was earning a better wage than most people with actual hourly jobs. Well this year has been significantly different, since school ended almost a month earlier, which freed me up to go job hunting at a time when many places near me need to hire people. I still consider the job search tedious, but today I discovered another added benefit of this search: greater spiritual strength.
I've never liked having to drive all over town to every store and walk in and ask the same question with the same, saccharine smile and tone: "Hi, are you currently accepting applications?" And for three days in a row, it's bored me to tears as it did last year and the year before, and the year before that. However, as I was in between horrendously long (no, seriously) internet applications because so few people do paper, I encountered a huge spiritual problem: I bumped into a forum on modesty where the moderator and her commenters were arguing about pornography.
Don't get me wrong here, I believe that porn is 100% wrong in all its forms, but in my past life (as recently as nine months ago) this was a big problem for me, and its specter continued to haunt me throughout this school year. I know that the main reason it even became a problem was that I've had my own laptop since middle school, and I've spent increasing amounts of time home alone with my usage completely unmonitored. And I know that even just for half an hour today, being home alone with my school computer provided an enormous temptation to which it would have been only too easy to give in. Coupled with the fact that I've been trying to keep up a regular prayer life in lieu of being able to go to Mass each day and Adoration and Confession each week, I've been getting a little bit despondent though I refuse to give in to temptation and start sinning the same way I was less than a year ago.
And this is why I need a job. Or rather, why I need to keep searching for a job. Yes, I really do detest driving around all day and asking the same tedious question to which an increasing number of answers are beginning to resemble "No, sorry, we're not interested in hiring anyone right now", but if I don't, sin creeps in and gets to work. The saying goes that an idle mind is the devil's playground, and having only to work fifteen hours a week for the last two summers, I know from experience just how much the devil likes to play and how little he likes to give up his old haunts. This is why I need a job. Not only do I like routine, but having a job will force me to establish one, and allow me to integrate as much prayer as I want into it, thus enabling me to fight the devil in his favorite form of temptation.
Saint Paul wrote in his first letter to Timothy in 6:12: "Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses" (NRSV). This verse is great for me, considering its direct application to this past school year. I did indeed confess to many witnesses in word and deed just how deeply I was immersed in my faith, and how much more deeply I wished to be immersed in it. I knew going into this summer that God was going to call me to be strong spiritually and emotionally, but I had no idea that He would use quotidian tedium to show me that I wouldn't just be trying to maintain momentum, I would be called to fight the good fight in a whole new way.
I'm hoping to finally be able to hit my first daily Mass in almost a week (le gasp!) tomorrow, as well as go in for my first job interview at a store that really, really seemed to need employees. I know that if I'm going to stay strong, pure, and out of trouble with my parents, I'm going to have to fight the good fight by getting up early, doing my hair, my make up, and driving across town for the fourth consecutive day. But at least now I know that when I hear the devil whisper five more minutes bright and early tomorrow morning, I'll get right up and dash for the shower and a quick shout out to St. Joseph for this job, so I can truly begin to fight the good fight and take hold of the eternal life to which I was called and for which I made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
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