Green lights from everyone. This meant each person on the interview team said yes to hiring me. I had just been through a rigorous interview process with a multinational technology corporation known for its tough interview practices. Now they had to make a final decision between me and an internal candidate. Drum roll.... They gave the job to the internal candidate. 

Because of the intense preparation required, the exhaustive process, and my feelings of disappointment, it took me a while to recover. Eventually, I continued my job search and landed another interview with the same company.

This time, my preparation was hampered by fear. I was petrified. I absolutely did not want to go through the same grueling situation again, especially since I was feeling there might be the same result. The night before my interview, I was so fearful that I didn’t want to show up the next day. I felt like a novice skier clinging to the bunny slope while being pushed to attempt a black diamond hill!

Gratefully, I had been reading that week’s Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, and soon I remembered a Bible quote from that Lesson: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4). 

The mountain of fear could be made low by knowing God’s all-power.

I quickly made the connection between my black-diamond-hill analogy and the phrase “Every mountain and hill shall be made low.” This mountain that I was making out of the interview, the mountain of fear, could be made low by knowing the truth about God’s all-power, the only power, and about my relation to God as His perfect spiritual idea. And every valley—of doubt, insecurity, and the fear of inadequacy—would be exalted or raised up to the light to be replaced with the knowledge of my true being as God’s loved child. 

These insights completely reversed my anxious thoughts and made me feel strong and confident. Have you heard the saying “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill”? Well, this was the reverse. Suddenly the looming interviews didn’t seem quite so scary anymore—they were a veritable molehill. 

Because I sing in choirs and love music, I remembered Handel’s Messiah, which includes an aria based on the “every mountain and hill” Bible verse. That night, I sang this piece to myself and was able to sleep peacefully. The next day, the day of the interview, I played a recording of it on repeat while getting ready and enjoyed filling my thoughts with only spiritual truths. I even sang along to it in the car on the way to the interview.

Fun and job interview are words that aren’t usually used together. But I actually had a lot of fun that day. Each person I met with gave me a unique and complex challenge to figure out and explain (I had to walk the interviewers through what I would do and why I would do it), and it felt like an interesting game where you solve one puzzle and then move on to tackle something different.

When I again got green lights from the hiring team but was bested by an internal candidate, I felt at peace. Even though I didn’t get the job, I had risen above fear and found joy. Interestingly, my next gig was a contract role at the same company—a role for which, quite surprisingly, I ended up not even having to interview! The spiritual lessons from this entire experience continue to lift me up whenever I am faced with a “mountain” that looks daunting. And as God’s child, you, too, have the right to recognize God’s power and express fearless dominion.