You Are Not Your Job Title

A close friend of mine sat in his car in the parking garage for twenty minutes after the layoff meeting, engine off, security badge already collected, a cardboard box of picture frames and a coffee mug on the passenger seat like evidence from a crime scene. Fifteen years at the company, and the final conversation took six minutes. As he drove over to my study later that afternoon, he confessed an absurd panic: he didn’t even know how to introduce himself at a dinner party anymore, because the first question is always what you do, and he no longer had an answer that fit on a business card.

Listening to him, I recognized how easily all of us let our sense of worth quietly relocate into a title, until the job becomes less a thing we do and more a thing we are. Genesis reminds us that God made humanity in His own image before Adam had accomplished a single task, before the garden was tended or a line of work was named. The image comes first. The doing was always meant to flow from who we are in God, not manufacture it. Yet there remains a real grief in the morning when the laptop opens and the calendar is blank.

We sat together in the quiet study, letting that ancient truth settle against the shock of an empty Monday. Some days letting go of a title feels like freedom; other days it feels like grief wearing freedom’s clothes. But whoever made you did so before you were useful to anyone. In the eyes of your Father, that is where your worth will always remain.

That truth is enough to steady any heart for tonight.