When your relationship with Christ grows, God will sometimes lead you through unfamiliar roads—but each one has purpose. These paths may not always make sense in the moment. They might stretch your faith, challenge your comfort, or shift your plans. But they are never random. Each step is part of His design, drawing you closer to His heart and shaping you for what’s ahead.

Interestingly, these roads expose the shame, lies, guilt, fear, burdens, and false hopes the world built you with.

Does that mean you should not begin your relationship with Him? Noo, but through all the narrow roads and sufferings, God shows us one incredible thing.

He is behind us, He is with us, and He is in front of us.

When I lost my job, I felt all the emotions of having failed. Despite the situations that were out of my control, I remembered to do one thing.

In my most hurtful moment, I praised God, most imperfectly.

Losing your job is a matter of shame as well, a culture that taught us to feel you have failed. But God sees us differently and that’s what matters. His path is beyond our wildest imaginations and His path gives us purpose.

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise. (Psalm 51:17)

We live in a time of financial crisis, where I always see people constantly worrying about losing jobs, stability, income, and their future. I even heard people regretting the decision to have children because they worry about the hardship the children will go through due to the uncertainty of the job market in the future. I went through a season of internal wrestling or suffering until I gave up the control to God than being worried. Know that, we need not be worried, because we serve a God whom we can trust if we rely on Him. I will explain why.

God taught me 5 main lessons through the season.

The first lesson

Your identity doesn’t come from your job, it come from Christ

This was the most significant and first lesson, because I had to wrestle with finding the courage to truthfully say “I got laid off”. Then you deal with many people constantly asking for updates of your job hunt. Oh dear, how to answer this? Most often you feel tempted to lie and snip off. But truth will set you free.

That’s when I learned “my identity doesn’t come from the worth that I myself and the world around puts in the fact that “you are employed”.

It comes from GOD, being His Child and seeking His righteousness.

I was called to pray for those who laid me off despite the internal wrestling. A true moment of humbling.

 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4)

The second lesson

To learn to trust God, when everything is stripped from you

Society keeps pushing you to chase credentials, and it’s not a bad thing. It is sometimes necessary to stand out, but in this path God asked me to take, I learned a valuable lesson.

As I went through many months of striving to find another job, nothing was coming to fruition. No matter how many jobs I applied for, how many places I dropped off resumes, something seemed to block the results. This wasn’t a big struggle in my earlier job searches, but this time, interestingly, I could see a pattern.

Even though I did all that I could, God made me understand, your faith in your works will never save, it’s He who saves. Basically, He stripped me of all the false hope given by my hard earned certifications, my experience and everything else and emptied me completely, only to teach me to entirely put my faith in Him and trust God’s ways are higher than our ways.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:9 )

Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. (Psalm 127:1)

The third learning.

To ask God to reveal and lead you towards the purpose He originally planned for your life.

In moments of my grounding, I finally decided to pray “God, please take me to the place you want to lead me, the one you originally designed for me.”

During this period, a time came when my resume was headstrong and my qualifications and certifications called out for jobs with many transferrable skills, but I felt in my spirit, a strong Noo. (Small and stern voices of God)

I continued to pray to be led by God, wherever that may be, to do something according to His will. I prayed to use the skills, abilities, and innate nature God designed in me, to be used for His glory.

I had learned from my spiritual experiences that when you pray for something to be led by God’s will, oh boy, you can’t imagine the provisions, blessings and the joy that come with it. Even if I have felt successful in some of my previous jobs, I have never felt experience of true joy. The question is What are you truly seeking? I got the revelation to truly seek the joy of the Lord because we all know that happiness is different from joy. Most of us feel burn out trying to find happiness in things that don’t truly satisfy. But joy functions differently; it satisfies our body, soul and spirit and it comes from the Lord. I will give you an example. People often choose to have more children despite the challenges of parenting because the joy these pure beings bring is immeasurable.

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

The fourth learning

To understand God gives all that you “need” to sustain.

In this season, I felt the burden of not contributing to the family. But I was very specifically led to take off the egoistic mentality of being the “earning woman” and submit to the hands of Christ, and to intentionally stop chasing the power given by earning. This is a challenging notion in the modern world, which I once proudly held. Women’s earning isn’t the issue. The real question is—are we letting income shape our influence in marriage more than our faith and commitment? Think about it, does our egoistic attitude truly serve relationships?? This is where God’s guidance matters, otherwise, we end up constantly bearing the weight without even discerning it.

Following God’s righteousness in marriage is what’s going to fulfill your marriage and bring peace.

As I walked through this season, God taught me to allow Him to lead, asked me to lie back and watch how He takes care of all that we need. Not once have I felt I lacked His mercies, and we both felt sustained and saw miracles even when we felt like something was not going to work out. In the most unimaginable or unexpected ways, we lived like any other day despite being a single-earner household.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.(Proverbs 14:12)

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Corinthians 11:3 )

The fifth learning

When God opens a door, nothing can shut it

We have all heard this. What makes it beautiful is the way it blossoms. He revealed to me the path He wanted me to take in the most unexpected way. When that happened, I could see how things started to unravel in the most organic and unbelievable ways. I started experiencing the unexpected joys and provisions of a door opened by God, which I will share in its due time, by God’s will. Most of all, I feel the awe of experiencing how God was in front of this path this whole time, building my faith in Him.

But the ultimate conviction is even if this doesn’t come to pass, what matters is how I gained Christ and to learn that it is for freedom that Christ has set me free, and to be assured the clutches of Sin, where shame, guilt, fear, lies, burdens, and powerlessness have no gain over me.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)

What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ. (Philippians 3:8 )