Today is one of those days.
It’s not easy to share something raw, but today I need to let it out…
It was a number of years ago, back at our home church in North Fort Worth.
My wife and I had been spending time with our senior pastor and were grateful for his time.
At that time, I was learning my craft as a writer and working on my first book…
But I had this odd “itch” inside me.
Ever since I was 15, I knew I was called to be a Shepherd (think “Pastoral Care” type person).
Except I was wired for business.
My church, and even my pastor at that time, didn’t know what to do with me.
I had no desire to be on a church staff.
I also tried to be a missionary 3x and never felt it was a fit.
It was a season where direction and purpose were just fuzzy.
Like staring into a dark room and all you have is a match with only a few seconds of burn time.
Inside me was a deep desire to help, encourage and inspire people.
The canvas in front of me was called “Business” NOT “Ministry”.
And there was this huge chasm to cross between how in the world a “Pastor” functions in “Business”.
I didn’t have a lot of direction in my life at that time.
Even my pastor finally told me “Since you don’t want to be in ministry, when you get a real job, let me know”.
And just like that, he dropped me.
There was this unspoken idea that permeated my thinking back then.
There’s the spiritual and personal sides of our lives – and we think the two are separate.
“Sacred” vs. “Secular”.
Better said, we need to keep the “Personal” out of “Business”.
So for years, I kept my dreams and all the wonky ideas and passions bottled up inside me.
Kept my nose down and simply did what I was told.
There was and still is a longing to be fully REAL and to find that balance doing what I love without needing to compromise.
And yet job after job, it was like pounding a square peg into a round hole.
It was a hard lesson learned.
And it took the COVID pandemic to learn it.
Sunday evening, the weight would settle on me.
Friday afternoon, I would climb out of my diving suit and go into “decompress mode”.
There’s no way to boot-strap yourself into a “Job Description” that wasn’t written for you.
In a recent Monster.com survey, over 85% of job applicants cited “BURNOUT” as the #1 reason they were looking to make a change.
A follow-up report by Joblist revealed that 75% of all people they surveyed were even willing to make a change without another job lined up.
That’s evidence of what I struggled with for years.
Stuck in something that never seemed right for me.
And it reached a point of desperation.
You feel like you are drowning but unable to come up for air.
And the sad reality is, NO ONE can tell all this is going on – on the inside.
Yes…
It’s a journey that very few are willing to take.
It’s a journey that requires a great deal of courage.
Courage to face the reality that what we strived so hard to create may not really be what we originally wanted.
And corporations, where I spent most of my career are notorious for squeezing the life out of their team members.
Do more with less.
Put up with broken Woke Liberal agendas.
Watch the very people you care about as a leader get crushed under the pressure.
See the implosion of families, all for the sole pursuit of profit.
…………………………………………………
I didn’t plan on writing this…
I really didn’t.
But I had to.
Isaiah 61 talks about a time in human history where people are:
- Brokenhearted
- Poor (not just financially)
- Captive
- Prisoners
- Stuck in darkness
- Unable to find hope
- Mourning
- Grieving
- Despairing
I’ve never seen another time in human history that is more broken, dark and desperate than NOW.
This is that time.
It’s an incredible opportunity to finally realize…
You were made for something much more than the sum total of your experiences.
It wasn’t easy to resign from a great paying job with only a sliver of a dream in hand.
But I had to.
It didn’t fit.
And I had to wake up to finally realize I had been building an empire that was leaning on the wrong mountain.
Time to now do it God’s way.
~Helping you create true and lasting success~