The Theology of Ordinary Things

A Theology of the Resume

The resume assumes that a list of jobs is a fair summary of a human soul, and we have half-believed it. But a person is a mystery made in God's image, not a ledger of roles and outputs. Christ sees the parts of you no resume can hold, your hidden faithfulness, your secret wounds, your love, and he measures a life by what it was for others, not by what it accomplished for itself.

Look closely at a resume, that ordinary document, and notice its strange theology. It quietly claims that a person can be adequately represented as a sequence of titles, dates, and quantified accomplishments. It has no column for kindness, no line for the night you sat with a dying friend, no metric for the temptations you resisted or the people you raised. It is a portrait of a soul with the soul left out.

We accept this without blinking. We spend hours perfecting the document, and we let it stand in for us before strangers who will decide things about our lives. We even start to see ourselves through its categories, narrating our years as a career arc, feeling that seasons which do not fit the format, illness, caregiving, wandering, searching, are gaps to be explained away rather than parts of a life.

The resume came from a real need. As people moved among employers who did not know them, some standardized way to signal competence became necessary, and the resume did that job efficiently. There is nothing sinister in it; it is a useful instrument for a specific purpose. The trouble begins when the instrument quietly expands its claim, from here is what I can do for a firm to here is who I am, and we forget to object.

The cost is a shrunken self-understanding. You begin to value the parts of your life that photograph well on paper and discount the rest, though the rest may be where your actual worth lives. You meet others and reflexively file them by role. You reach midlife with an impressive document and a nagging sense that the truest things about you, and about the people you love, appear nowhere on it. A ledger has been mistaken for a person.

Christ offers a different accounting. He notices the widow's small unseen gift, the private prayer, the cup of water given quietly; he reads the resume no one else can see, the ledger of hidden love and secret faithfulness. In the Christian vision you are not the sum of your positions but a soul made in God's image, known entirely by your Maker, including everything the document omits. What you did for the least, when no one recorded it, turns out to be the line that lasts.

The better way keeps the resume in its place. Use it, polish it, let it do its narrow and honest work of describing what you can do for an employer. But refuse to let it tell you who you are, and refuse to read other people by it. Cultivate the parts of your life that will never fit the format, because those are likely the parts God is most attentive to, and the parts that will be spoken of when you are gone.

If you have started to see yourself as a document rather than a soul, you are seen far more fully than any page can hold. Living Bread is built on the conviction that your worth is given by God, not tallied by your accomplishments. Consider stepping into a community where people are known by the whole of their lives, and where the hidden, unlisted faithfulness is exactly what is honored and encouraged.