Imagine going into your favorite bank branch on Thursday and then again on Saturday and seeing a completely new face handing you a deposit slip, ushering you to a personal banker, or asking you for your social security number.  The day a bank fails everybody in the bank gets fired. 

Banks fail.  People get fired.  And on Friday–always Friday. 

When I supervised a moderate-sized staff at a church a few years ago, one of the first things I was told by a mentor was not to fire people on Friday.  You wouldn’t want someone to have the entire weekend to stew over things.  Fire them on Monday was the advice.  I feared the day I’d have to “let someone go.”  I think my first “You don’t work here anymore” meeting was on a Wednesday.  It was still ugly.

Chicago Public radio covered the processes after the federal government intervenes in a failing bank.  I turned the story off and images of teams of people in suits carrying briefcases flooded my eyes.  It turns out that the government has taken over nearly 200 banks and that when banks are taken over, not many people know about it before the event.  A member from one of the government teams called in to be interviewed from an undisclosed location, an hour away from his next appointment to deliver the news of another takeover.  His life at the time of the interview was filled with stints in multiple cities for sporadic amounts of time, leaving him exhausted and rootless.

The treatment also highlighted the experiences of several people who worked for one such bank.  One banker finds his identity so strongly in his work that months after he’s been fired from the bank, he’s still introducing himself by saying his name and the (now defunct) bank and its tagline.  I think that man’s experience is similiar to most people’s because we identify with work or family or roles or activities until those things become our answer to the identity question. 

Identity answers the who are you question.  Identity is not the role we play, but it is connected to the role.  It isn’t the thing we do, but it’s inseparable from it. 

Most of us wouldn’t find it easy to talk about who we are without refering to something we do or more pointedly to something we’re paid to do.  I think that’s why unemployment is so debilitating for most of us.  Because we fear it points to a small failure in us.

It’s not simply about the financial changes which sweep into our homes when we lose income.  It’s not just about how much less we’ll spend, about which bills might be paid, or what we’ll have to sell or dispense with to survive.  Work and unemployment slip under our skins so that we’re pressed to ask deeper questions.  Questions about who we are and who we’re not. 

When we have less, we’re pushed (and sometimes pushed hard) to query our heads and hearts for what matters.  We find out what we value and how expensive those values are.  We see our implicit, deep-down comparisons to others which always leave us with the sense that we’ve missed some mark or come late to a party.

Now, two questions for you: What experiences (work or otherwise) do you find most critical to who you are?  And how have you handled the changes or failures in your life?