Resumes: They Don’t Tell the Truth

Resumes are very deceptive.  They are meant to tell a story – a story of success.  If you read my resume, you’d be impressed.  That’s the idea.  Resumes capture life’s accomplishments.  But accomplishments just don’t magically happen.  There’s work involved … and there’s failure … sometimes a lot of failure.  Resumes never convey the ways people have failed.  Well written resumes hide the difficult times people have experienced.

I’m fortunate enough to know several people in their 20s.  They are at the start of their careers. As a group, they have energy, talent, intellect and sass that I greatly admire. They face many more obstacles than I did when I was their age.  It’s not surprising that I see them become very frustrated by some of those obstacles.  It’s not that they don’t have a commitment to hard work.  Instead, they’ve been taught the lie that hard work brings success.  The truth is that some of the hardest working people in this world are dirt poor and seem to have nothing positive in their lives despite working very hard.  It’s because of social obstacles and economic systems which favor certain groups that many people just can’t get ahead.

If I could convey anything to the young people I know, it wouldn’t be to learn from my successes.  Yeah, it’s great that I’ve published eight books, lectured in about a dozen countries, received numerous awards, have a few honorific titles and advanced degrees.  None of those things have given me depth of character or inner strength.  All that great stuff on my resume – yes, it’s nice to have, but that’s not what makes me a person worth knowing.

It seems to me what really matters in life is how we’ve dealt with the difficult times.  It’s the way in which we face life’s difficulties, move through them, and come out the other side which make us the people we are.  Some call it resiliency.  Others describe it as thriving.  Perhaps at times, it’s really not much more than surviving.  Success in life isn’t about the length of the resume, the money earned, or the power and influence one has in organizations and networks.  A successful and happy life has much more to do with inner qualities that can’t be easily measured. Those qualities are often developed when moving through difficult times.

In my case, it’s because I struggled as a young adult during my years in college with coming out that I have compassion for others who also struggle.  Feeling so very alone and isolated, I was at the point of wanting to end my life.  It seemed to get better as I developed new friends.  Then, when I came out to those friends, they cut me off.  The irony was that when I felt a bit stronger in myself, the people I first trusted knocked me back down. But I persisted.  The hurt and pain from those years led me to activism and working for social change.

Of course, that life of activism took a different toll.  In my late-30’s, the bottom fell out of my life due to burnout.  I had been working as a clinical director of an HIV/AIDS counseling program, the founding pastor of a new church, and consultant with a medical school.  For several years, I worked 60 to 70 hours each week.  The bottom fell out when the counseling agency lost all funding and other circumstances beyond my control happened at the same time.  I was devastated.  It seemed that all my hard work ended in ashes. For a year, I was on unemployment and rarely left home. Then I sold my home, moved to another part of the country, and at age 40 for a year lived off the proceeds from my home sale as I rebuilt my life.  At that time, it seemed like my life was an utter failure.  But it was that experience which led me to greater wholeness and enabled me to live more fully.

As I see the young people I know struggle with obstacles in life, I recognize that their challenges are different from my own.  Yet, I wish I could convey to them that there is more to learn from life’s failures than from success.   Yes, it’s really the things that aren’t on my resume which truly matter.

As a Christian, I understand the way in which we move through difficult times in life to be the heart of the message of Jesus.  The sacred stories of the gospels convey that Jesus embraced a horrible, unjust death characterized by ridicule and scorn.  In the face of what must have appeared to be the ultimate failure in life, he kept faith and held onto hope. Ultimately, that agony was transformed to new life – a life that was not the same as before but was essentially transcendent and transformative.

Now in my sixties, it’s very clear to me:  a life well lived isn’t about what’s on the resume.  No, the good life is shaped by the way we have moved through the troubles we face and how we come out on the other side.  That’s a very important lesson to learn.  It’s a lesson we should be teaching younger generations of people rather than urging them to achieve external success.

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