Living in the state with the worst economy in the country makes unemployment a topic of frequent conversation. Greg Gilbert on the 9Marks blog recently posted the ten things that a member at Capital Hill Baptist has learned from his unemployment.

#1: Own your unemployment

This struggle has revealed how much I wrongly value work and wrongly value being seen as important.  As a reaction to this new reality, my flesh wants to pass through this trial quickly.  My flesh doesn’t want to slow down and absorb the lessons that God has for me in this season.

So there is a constant struggle to avoid admitting that I am unemployed or that my unemployment has extended so long because it tells my flesh that the world doesn’t think much of me.  So I am tempted to tell people that I took a few months off before I really started looking; anything to minimize the embarrassment.

Embracing the trial, to me, means being honest with myself and forcing myself to run to God and to depend on him.  I need to work at not putting up defenses.  I need to regularly admit to people that I am unemployed…

This honest assessment drives me to the scriptures to find rest and solace in God and His word and NOT in anything else.

#2: Preach to yourself

In times like this, it is too easy to speak to yourself and become discouraged, to doubt and even to accuse God.  We need to arm ourselves with His word and battle those thoughts.  As Paul says in 2 Corinthians: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Here are a few common “thoughts” that we need to “take captive:” worry (Luke 12), fears that my struggle is meaningless (James 1), fears that God doesn’t love me (Galatians 4:6-7), fears that God is powerless (Numbers 1:23).

Use God’s Word to fight your thoughts that challenge God’s truth.

#3: Prepare for the Storm

The book of James is clear that we do not know the future.  We don’t even know what is going to happen tomorrow.  So, we are wise, to prepare.  As proverbs says: “Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer.”  Are you prepared for tomorrow?  For those of you with jobs, you are in your ‘summer.’  Are you preparing for winter?   Don’t think that it can’t happen to you.  It is a good thing to live well within our means so that we can give sacrificially now while also saving that we might provide for our families in the future.

#4: Depend on the LORD

As a believer, it is a blessing to depend on the LORD.  It is really evident to me that the LORD is pouring out his grace on me and my family right now.  We know that Faith is a gift from God and he has been kind to allow me to trust him as I walk through this trial.

God is giving me hope.  Not just in that he will provide a next job.  But is giving me hope in him and is fitting me for heaven.

#5: Be surprised at his Kindness

In the midst of real difficultly, this has been a surprisingly sweet period in my life.  Don’t get me wrong, I want a job, but I see this as God ordained.  He gives and he takes.  And, while waiting for a job, he has blessed me.

• He has refreshed my soul and reoriented my heart towards Him.
• I have been able to spend a ton of time with my family.
• The extra time has allowed me to serve my church and care for them.

God knew what I needed and has been an abundant provider of blessing.

#6: Encourage the unemployed

We are called to shoulder one another’s burdens. Around town I hear that job-searcher fatigue is taking hold.  That is, people are getting tired of helping job searchers.  As a church, we must not grow weary in doing good, but continue providing for those who are unemployed.

#7: Beware of Idol Worship

We know from Genesis 2 that work is ordained by the LORD and is good.  But our hearts are idol-factories, and in the middle of a prolonged search a job can easily become more important than God and drain your joy. And we lose perspective and think that all we need is a job and then life will be happy and fulfilling.  So we must fight this tendency by recognizing it, confessing it, and exercising the discipline of thanksgiving in all situations.

#8: Cry out to the LORD

It is a good thing to cry and pour out your heart to God.  Trials remind us that any sense that we have it all together is a complete illusion.  God and God alone is in control. As the Psalmist says: “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.”

#9: Invest the Extra time well

Being without a job is not without its benefits.  You have extra time on your hands.  And, you will soon miss this when you get a new job.

• Serve others
• Walk through this trial with other unemployed members of the church.
• Spend more time reading and with the LORD.  One warning: you still need to plan your quiet times or the day will slip by without one.

#10: Take Advantage of Unique Opportunities for Evangelism

Many friends and former colleagues have invested their entire lives in work.  And now many of them are unemployed and are panicking…  All of my former colleagues, whether employed or unemployed, expect that I should be panicking too.  That is the natural reaction of an unbelieving world.

What’s more, I’ve found that people who normally would never ask you how you are doing will do so now–and now they expect more than a cursory answer.  This is a great and natural opportunity to share how you are trusting in the Lord.  Share how the Lord has provided for you this week or how the church members are caring for you, or what Scripture you are feeding on that day.

In my experience, it floors people when they realize that you are trusting in something other than yourself.  And right there is the opening to share the hope of the Gospel!

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been seeking God intently as to what I feel is His call on my life to plant a church in Ann Arbor. One of the steps in that process was finding a new church, which resulted in our home at Grace. Another step in the process is applying to the Acts 29 Network, a church planting network started at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA. Part of the application process is submitting a preaching sample. Since I don’t have any recordings from when I preached in Virginia at either Image or to the youth at CRBC, I have been praying for an opportunity to preach.

God answered that prayer last Monday. Pastor Larry Mattis, from Briarwood Baptist Church, called me and asked if I would be available to preach on Sunday, May 24. I visited Briarwood in October 2008 during our search and talked to Pastor Mattis about being called to plant in Ann Arbor. I greatly appreciate this opportunity and am looking forward to presenting God’s word. I’m unsure yet as to the passage I will preach on, but that should be determined in the next day or so.

If anyone out there in blog-land wants to worship God with Julie, Malachi and I through singing, reading the bible, and my very rusty preaching, join us at this Sunday at 11 a.m.  The address is 7950 Warren Road Ann Arbor, MI.

So, the Ann Arbor News is closing, to be replaced by AnnArbor.com. Good thing? Most definitely no. There will be less true reporting, and more opinion, more attitude, more candor, which is not a good thing.

I think this will negatively affect coverage of U of M sports. I’m not all that impressed by their coverage now, and there’s no way that they can compete against sites like mgoblog.com, mvictors.com, and umhoops.com.

I think this will negatively affect coverage of high sports. Who will be out covering the Huron girls’ soccer games, or the Pioneer swim meets, or Ypsi track meets? By reducing this coverage, and the lose of the “Ann Arbor News Player of the Year”, students will have less media coverage and less exposure to recruiters from colleges. Could some students not be able to afford coverage because the scholarship that they would have received with more coverage wasn’t available?

I think this will negatively affect coverage of religion. Right now, the AA News does an okay job of reporting about religion. By moving things online and relying on citizen journalists, there’s no incentive for people to report on things they don’t care about, and as I’ve written about before, Ann Arbor doesn’t care much about religion.

I think this will negatively affect people who don’t have access to technology. Do we really think that people will take a bus to the library to read AnnArbor.com on a public computer? There has already been a study examining the closing of the Cincinnati Post and they reported that

The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.

Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, the researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office.

Does this mean that the only people who will be involved and truly in the know will be elite?

It’s a sad day when a newspaper closes. I like sitting down and reading a physical product, feeling the paper and getting dirty from the ink. It forces me to think local. When they ask people from where they get their news, they always say “TV” or “Internet”. No reporter ever follows up with “Where do you get your local news?” Very soon, the answer to that question will be “Nowhere”

From Owen Strachen, Managing Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at TEDS  

We should work hard when we receive a lower grade than we wanted to not gripe about it to friends. This is not mature, and it’s fundamentally prideful. It’s snarky, and ungodly, and it demeans our instructors. If absolutely necessary, we should ask the professor or teacher if we can talk over the grade. Otherwise, though, we should work to detach our identity from our grades. This is hard, but necessary, to do, and it will kill much pride in the process.

Furthermore, we need to dynamite this ridiculous notion that we, possessed with luminous, blinding brilliance deserve an A or even a B. Many of us don’t. For hard professors, very few students should expect to earn high grades. Would that we had more hard, demanding, excellent professors who taught us well and who didn’t cheat us out of a satisfying educational experience by rewarding laxity, whining, and wimpy classroom behavior.

Parents of children, accordingly, need to work very hard not to find pride in the academic performance of their children. Making this mistake will teach their children that results matter most and that effort need only be mediocre to warrant high achievement.

A Christ-centered approach to education, in sum, seems to be an approach that, above all else, prizes Christ, not grades. We don’t need high marks; we need our holy master, and far, far less of our whining, weak, proud, tremulous, man-centered natural hearts

I f it is true that food is the new sex, however, where does that leave sex? This brings us to the paradox already hinted at. As the consumption of food not only literally but also figuratively has become progressively more discriminate and thoughtful, at least in theory (if rather obviously not always in practice), the consumption of sex in various forms appears to have become the opposite for a great many people: i.e., progressively more indiscriminate and unthinking.

From the Hoover Institutions Policy Review (HT: Albert Mohler)

• Does getting rid of a policy preventing the financial support of overseas abortions get presented by liberals as reducing abortions
• Would the company who manufactures a widely available abortificant advertise it during a show which follows around a large, conservative family