There Is No Regular Job

I had a much better version of this for a while.

It was probably not so much better, as it was happier and more dishonest. There was a part about how everything in life has a silver lining. At one point I mentioned how God is a mystery.

It felt like those Christian movies – the ones that tie up everything in the last 5 minutes, regardless of whether or not that’s how life actually works. 

Here is how it started: I think I expected a lot more drama when God changes your life. More like a movie. Less like 9:36am on a Thursday.

Where I am now began about 4 years ago with me standing next to my car and staring at a vacant building. God and I said some things to each other there. I began to be obsessed with the idea of taking this vacant building and turning it from a place for people to get high in, and building something positive out of it.  Like creating jobs for those who can’t get them.

That first day, I met a guy there who asked me for a job because he would have to go back to dealing drugs to feed his family if he didn’t get a regular job. He was nervous he would get caught and go back to jail. He had only been out for a week.

At this point in the story I hadn’t been punched in the mouth yet, so I only saw possibility.

I began praying each day with a passion I had never experienced in my life. I began walking around the building every day, praying bold prayers, and talking to anyone that even remotely asked what I was up to. 

Then life went a little bonkers.

I don’t say this next part to add any drama, it’s just that strange things started happening.  I have pages and pages in a journal, these next few are what stand out to me off the top of my head. I usually don’t mention these parts, but I think it helps set up everything else.

I had prayed about things in life before, but not like this. Not for this long or with this much focus. I went out every single day that I could and walked around that building while praying over and over. I felt a little crazy, and might have stopped if it hadn’t been for my wife who encouraged me to be open to God’s leading.

Weird stuff happened.  

That’s really the only way I can describe it.

Some days flocks of crows would circle around me – typically right when I started praying. They would just appear from somewhere.  The moment I got in the car they would leave. I had drug addicts run up to tell me they could feel my prayers when I was just walking silently. One time a guy jumped out of some bushes and tried to stab me, so I raised my arms and swelled up as big as I could and yelled at him in broken Spanish. My thinking was that my cat does the same thing when confronted.  Not the Spanish part, but the other stuff.

It worked.  He ran away.

I saw people at rock bottom over and over again and didn’t know what to do.

I made a lot of friends with homeless people. One guy still calls me Mark when I see him around town. I don’t know why that started.

I took a good amount of friends over there to talk about it and pray.

I made a few enemies that have been hard to forgive.

I prayed a lot of tears into that parking lot cement.  Some out of anger.  Some out of frustration.  Some just because.

At the end of 500 days of prayer – I didn’t add it up until later – I was still walking and praying around that building, doing everything I could think of, and God simply said no.

It wasn’t very dramatic. There wasn’t much to it. It was just simply no.

The board of the nonprofit we had formed suggested we pray about it for 30 days. So we prayed about it every day, and in the end, God was silent.

I was definitely not okay with that answer for a long time – probably way too long. But now I can see that if it was a yes, we would’ve lost everything. God saw a pandemic coming the end of that year that no one else saw. If God had given us what we asked for, we would have lost everything in the shut downs. It’s something you only learn in hindsight. 

And it’s one of those “easy to say, hard to accept” things.

If I had to go back, there are some things I know now that I would’ve changed. Sometimes I was too passionate in a stubborn, little kid way. There were also times, like when I was personally attacked, that I probably should have fought back louder.  

In the end, it happened the way it happened. I learned you can get cussed at, misunderstood, and threatened with lawsuits, and still survive.  

So what now?

The board and I decided to close the nonprofit, and we donated the remaining funds we’d received to another nonprofit in town that’s doing fantastic work at helping people get jobs – very much in the vein of what we were hoping to do.  

I thought closing the nonprofit would be some climactic final scene. The ending of a strange movie, but in reality, it was incredibly boring.  The State and I sent letters back and forth about every six weeks as I tried to dissolve the nonprofit for about a year during a pandemic.  The stuff of riveting cinema for sure.

It made me think about the day that I had resigned from my job as a youth pastor of almost ten years to start this journey. On my last day, a guy came up to me after church and asked if I was done. I told him yes, I was officially finished at the church, and he smiled as he said, “Oh good, so you are one of us now? A regular person.”

That messed with me a lot. There was so much in those dozen words.

I started a nonprofit to try to create more jobs for people who need them. I came from the church world, so it seemed like the only way to help people. God only uses church people right?  I needed to form a nonprofit or some parachurch thing. I thought that’s how you change things. 

And sometimes it is, but in my case it wasn’t. 

I also had naively started a small marketing business around the same time in order to support my family since I only took a small stipend from the nonprofit in the very beginning (and then only for a few months). I didn’t think much would come of it. To be honest, not much did in the beginning. It was just a side hustle.  And I had zero business experience.  Maybe less than zero really.

Eventually, with God’s grace, time and a lot of books and YouTube, I started to find my way. The little side hustle that could started to actually become something.

One night, my dad and I were talking on my back deck by the bonfire. I told him how odd it was that what I wanted to happen with the nonprofit wasn’t going anywhere, but in the process I was really loving running a small business. It was awesome, and I felt bad. God couldn’t really mean for that to be THE thing, right?  It was just a regular job.  

Now, to be honest, over the years my dad has given me lots of advice. Most of it I totally forgot.  But that night was different.  He talked with me about how sometimes God sets you on a path, and the point is not the end of that path. The point is to get you farther down that road so you’ll intersect with another path. You don’t get to know that ahead of time. Sometimes you never get to know that. But it happens all the time with God and it’s okay to love where God places you, even if it’s not what you expected.  What “we expect” has never been God’s goal. 

I think about that every morning.

I don’t know if the point of everything was to get me to where I am now, but I do know that the more my wife and I open ourselves up to God, things change. Something happens when you take what you do – whatever it is – and place it all before God and go, “I’ve never done this before, but if my life really is yours, then where I spend my energy in my working days is yours as well. Please show me how to honor you with it.”  

Each day has been a lesson for me about how God can do way more when I put as much of my life as I can in His hands. We’ve been able to help lawyers, real estate agents, farmers, manufacturers, nonprofits, people down my street, and the poorest of the poor in places like Nepal, Madagascar and South Africa. What do you do with a God who guides your steps like that? The whole time I thought I was failing, but God was setting the stage for whatever was next.

I don’t know if you are like me some Monday mornings, but I am learning that it’s okay to try to change the world by doing your regular job really well. If God made you a builder, build it. If you’re a creative, you had better create. If you work in accounting, add all the things and feel the joy of being where God placed you and how you are able to help create order in His world.   

If you feel like you’re on a road you don’t understand, one truth I’ve consistently learned over the years is that God uses it all – the big, the small, the scary, the bland, and the not-so-random random – God uses it all to put you where you need to be for His Glory and for His Reasons alone.

Everything else seems to just be commentary.