I’ve been job searching this summer. I started my job search by uncovering my resume and sprucing it up with new skills and my most recent additional duties and promotions at school. Then I uploaded my newly refreshed resume to some job sites and setup job alerts so I’d receive an email every time a new posting would match my preset filters. Because I uploaded my resume, the sites also attempted to match keywords from my resume to the descriptions in job postings. This ended up with some funny emails that seemed to constantly critique the skills I lacked for certain jobs and displaying proudly the two skills (out of a list of fifteen or so) they were able to match to my resume.

“Emily, you’re the perfect candidate for this new job posting that requires 10 years of experience and a Ph.D. because you type 70 words per minute!”

Arlen discussed the two most common pitfalls we fall into when reading Titus 1:5-9. We often look at it and say, “I’ll never be in the office of elder, so why do I care about the position’s qualifications?” Or we try to use the passage as a list of standards to achieve, wrongly thinking those called to fill the position of elder are somehow more righteous. But Arlen directed our attention to the role of an elder in the church: to be a guardrail for the people. And he noted that the whole church, elders and all, do not belong to some system, but belong to Christ alone. Therefore, these qualifications we see in Titus are not a list to be checked off, or a task to be achieved, but rather it’s a working of the Spirit within us to refine our character and make us more like Christ.

In The Road to Character by David Brooks, he starts the book saying, “Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being - whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.” He goes on to explain that our world is oriented around building the resume virtues when the more important part of life is developing the eulogy virtues.

This is what Arlen explains to divert us from the pitfall of trying to measure up to a list of virtues by completing a series of tasks. Rather, our formation of character, and in this case, the work of our lives conforming to Christ, takes that eulogy virtue formation which is not done by us and our works, but is done by the Spirit.

Just a few pages later, Brooks writes, “Today, community service is sometimes used as a patch to cover over inarticulateness about the inner life. Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches it’s students about character. She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external.”

So as I waded through job postings and filled in applications this summer, I reflected on this struggle: recognizing my character as an internal working of the Spirit rather than the list of skills and experiences that fill my resume. Every job alert email I received pointed out this struggle. I look to the Lord and the working of His Spirit to work within me, sanctifying, refining, and creating something that looks more and more like the character of Christ.

~Emily Spare