Let me off the ride!

My father's family owned an amusement park in Pittsburgh. Loving amusement parks was programmed into my DNA. As a child, the only ride I didn't enjoy was the cylinder in which the centrifugal force was strong enough to pin all the riders to the walls. For as long as I can remember, I have loved roller coasters. If you are ever in central Pennsylvania, I highly recommend The Phoenix at Knoebels Amusement Park.

I do not enjoy emotional roller coasters. During our years of infertility I would get my hopes up and then would come crashing down each month that I was not pregnant or each time I had a miscarriage. Over the past seventeen months I've been on another roller coaster ride as my husband has been searching for a job. We submit an application and hope that he will be called for a phone interview. I've submitted over one hundred applications for him. About twenty of those have resulted in phone interviews. After each phone interview we wait and hope that he will be invited to interview on campus. Many times we never hear from the school again, but other times he has made it to the next stage of the interview process. When that happens, we wait and hope he will be offered the job, but almost every time he has gotten a rejection email instead. We are very, very ready to get off this ride, but as I read in a novel a few days ago, "The opposite of getting your hopes up is not harboring any". As painful as disappointments may be ("Hope deferred makes the heart sick" Proverbs 13:12), the absence of hope is a much worse state of being. I must continue to submit applications and pray, even if it means more ups and downs on this job search roller coaster.