I clock in every Sunday as a children’s ministry assistant, which is basically the only job where your coworkers are four feet tall, your performance review is a crayon drawing that either looks like a jellyfish or your face (but spiritually), and someone will ask you with a straight, earnest expression if God has a mailing address because they would like to send Him a letter about snack distribution fairness.
And today, the lesson plan handed to me—like a holy summons—was waiting on God.
Which is hilarious. Not because waiting on God isn’t real. Not because it isn’t sacred. But because I was tasked with teaching “waiting” to a demographic that can’t even wait for their own sentence to finish. A seven-year-old can detect the sound of a granola bar wrapper being opened in another room the way a Navy SEAL detects danger. These children do not respect a waiting season. They don’t respect a waiting minute. They don’t respect “almost.” They don’t respect “soon.” They don’t even respect “after we pray,” because they believe prayer is a quick formality before the main event: stickers, snacks, and chaos.
So I’m standing there with my Bible, my little lesson plan, and a faint sense of personal hypocrisy because I also don’t respect waiting seasons—mine just involve email inboxes and corporate portals that say, “Application Received” like it’s a condolence card.
And that’s when it hit me: the job hunt is a spiritual discipline nobody asked for. It is Lent, but for LinkedIn. It is fasting, but instead of food it’s dignity. It is a wilderness season where you apply, you pray, you refresh, you apply again, you refresh again, and at some point you begin to wonder if the hiring manager got raptured or if they simply evaporated into the same dimension where all “quick chats” go to die.
So yes, I taught the kids about waiting on God.
But mostly, God taught me about waiting on hiring managers.
Waiting on God, Waiting on Snacks, Waiting on Karen from HR Who Promised “Next Steps”
The verse for the day was Psalm 27:14: “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” Which is beautiful. Timeless. Comforting. Also the exact opposite of how modern life is structured, because we live in a world where we can order a phone case at 2:17 a.m. and have it delivered before we emotionally recover from the purchase.
So I told the kids, “Sometimes we want God to answer like Amazon Prime.”
And instantly, I felt the Holy Spirit and also the deep shame of knowing I have absolutely whispered the words “Lord, if You could just…” like I was negotiating expedited shipping.
I read the verse out loud, and of course a kid—because kids are the purest theologians and the most relentless hecklers—looked me dead in the face and said, “How long?”
And I just nodded like a wise spiritual mentor while internally screaming, Buddy… same.
Because “waiting” sounds poetic until you’re the one waiting. Then it feels less like a spiritual discipline and more like being stuck in a customer service chat where the representative keeps typing “…” for forty minutes and then disconnects.
Waiting on God is one thing. Waiting on people is another. Waiting on people who have access to your future and choose silence is a special category of sanctification I call the Corporate Desert.
That’s where you apply for a job, do the phone screen, do the panel interview that feels like you’re being cross-examined by six disappointed librarians, and then you get an email that says, “We loved meeting you!” and “We’re excited about your experience!” and “You’re a great culture fit!” and then they vanish like a magician with commitment issues.
No explanation. No closure. No follow-up. Just the haunting glow of your inbox and the slow realization that “we’ll be in touch” means “we will now become a rumor.”
And the kids? They understood this concept instantly, because their world is also full of unfulfilled promises.
They were promised fruit snacks after worship. They were told “in a minute.” They were told “after the lesson.” They were told “soon.”
They know what it’s like to wait for something that feels like it should’ve happened already.
This is why children are basically tiny job seekers. They live in constant dependence on authority figures who say things like “we’ll see” and “maybe later” and “not right now,” and if that isn’t the hiring process, I don’t know what is.
Open Doors, Closed Doors, and the Door That Leads to an Interview That Could’ve Been an Email
After waiting, the lesson moved into doors. Specifically Revelation 3:8: “See, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.”
I love this verse. I love the promise of it. I love the idea that when God opens something, it stays open, even if life tries to slam it, lock it, and pretend you were never invited in the first place.
So I told the kids, “Sometimes a ‘no’ is protection.”
And yes, I believe that.
Sometimes that “no” is God gently steering you away from the job that was going to grind you into dust, drain you like a phone battery at 3%, and then call it “high performance culture.”
Sometimes the closed door is mercy.
Sometimes the door you’re begging for is attached to a room full of people who clap when someone sends an email at 11:58 p.m. and calls it “initiative.”
But of course, the moment I said “open door,” another kid asked, “Is the door for puppies?”
And honestly?
Yes.
In my heart, yes.
Because this is how the job hunt feels too. You hear “open door” and you imagine peace, provision, purpose, maybe a slightly better health plan.
And instead, the door leads to a third-round interview where someone asks, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” and you want to say, “Alive.”
Some doors look promising until you walk through them. Some doors open and immediately reveal a company mission statement that reads like it was written by a caffeinated robot trying to sell hustle as a personality.
But God’s doors are different. God’s doors don’t open just to entertain you. They open to lead you.
Which is why we don’t measure a door by how shiny it is. We measure it by what’s on the other side.
And in the job hunt, that’s hard, because you don’t know what’s on the other side until you’re already in the building, trying to figure out why everyone looks tired and the break room is haunted.
So we talked about trust. About how rejection doesn’t always mean you weren’t good enough. Sometimes it means you were being spared.
And while I said that for the kids, I also said it for myself, because I have stared at rejection emails like they were moral evaluations of my worth as a human being, when really they were just automated messages sent by an ATS named “TalentBridge9000.”
Courage, Rejection, and the Sacred Art of Getting Up Again When Kickball (or Life) Didn’t Pick You
Then we moved into courage. Joshua 1:9: “Be strong and courageous… for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
This verse is a spiritual chest thump. It’s God basically saying, “Yes, it’s hard. Yes, you’re nervous. Yes, you feel like you’re walking into the unknown. But you’re not alone.”
So I told the kids, “Even if you don’t get the job, you’re not alone.”
And a kid whispered, “I didn’t get picked for kickball.”
Sir.
Welcome to corporate America.
Because that is the same emotional injury with different branding. It’s the sting of watching other people get chosen while you stand there with your hand half-raised, pretending you don’t care, pretending you’re cool, pretending you didn’t practice being picked in the mirror the night before.
Rejection is one of the most universal experiences, and yet it always feels personal. It always feels like a commentary on you, when half the time it’s about timing, budgets, internal candidates, weird politics, or the hiring manager’s nephew who “just needs a chance.”
So we talked about God working even when things feel stuck. Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good.”
I told them that includes rejected applications and interviews where they say “great culture fit” and then disappear like a magician with commitment issues. (I said it kinder to the kids, but the spirit of it was there.)
Then I reminded them worry is loud, but God is louder. Matthew 6:26: “Look at the birds of the air… your heavenly Father feeds them.”
And I said, “If God feeds birds who don’t even have resumes, He can handle your grown-up needs too.”
A kid said, “Birds don’t have cover letters.”
Exactly.
The birds aren’t on LinkedIn writing, “Excited to announce I’m open to new worms.”
The birds aren’t tailoring their resume to match a job posting that wants “entry-level” with “ten years of experience.”
The birds just wake up and do bird things and somehow provision shows up.
Then we closed with Proverbs 3:5–6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart… and he will make straight your paths.”
Which I translated, for the modern adult spirit, as: sometimes the path looks like interviews, rejection, silence, and then a door you didn’t even see coming.
And because job hunting is basically farming with Wi-Fi, we ended with Galatians 6:9: “Let us not grow weary of doing good… for in due season we will reap.”
Due season. Not immediate season. Not “by Tuesday” season. Due season.
Which is both comforting and deeply annoying.
The Bible really said, “You’ll reap. Eventually.”
Final Thoughts: Stickers, Faith, and Refreshing Your Inbox Like a Prayer
At the end of the lesson, we prayed. For people looking for work. For stressed-out parents. For everyone waiting on an email. For everyone stuck in the in-between, where nothing is certain except the fact that your brain will invent worst-case scenarios like it’s being paid to write horror films.
Then we handed out stickers, because children’s ministry understands what corporate America never will: morale needs tangible incentives.
One kid gave me a smiley face sticker and said, “This is for when you feel sad.”
And I walked out of church encouraged—not because my circumstances magically changed, not because my inbox suddenly became a fountain of opportunity, but because I remembered something I keep forgetting in the middle of the waiting:
Faith isn’t pretending it’s easy.
Faith is showing up anyway.
Faith is doing the next right thing when you don’t have the whole picture.
Faith is refreshing your inbox, taking a deep breath, and trusting that God writes better timelines than we do—timelines that don’t rely on Karen from HR remembering you exist.
So if you’re waiting right now—on a job, on clarity, on healing, on direction—just know this:
Worry is loud.
But God is louder.
And if He feeds birds without resumes, He can handle you too.
Even if your “reaping” shows up later than you wanted, it will still show up right on time.
