By any standards, I have had an amazing career in business. My path is unique and when I reflect over the past 20+ years, I am in awe of the journey I have been on. This is not to boast, as I feel like I have been given opportunities and had doors open when I was completely unqualified to do the job. By the favor and grace of God, I moved up the organizational ladder.
I started in manufacturing, learning how to manage a warehouse, build production plans and supervise the manufacturing process on the weekends. I thought my career was going to take me through the manufacturing ranks. With a twist, I end up working in a large Accounts Payable organization. Seeing it as a paper manufacturing line, I brought a manufacturing mindset to finance and transformed a struggling organization into a leading organization by all industry standards.
I was asked to lead the efforts to automate Accounts Payable on a global basis and that began a three-year journey of IT project management and development. Leading an international team we influenced governments, built processes, and connected thousands of vendors to an industry-leading process. It was an exciting time in my life. I was in my late twenties and saw my career trajectory going straight up. I was a new father and it was a time when Jesus captured my heart. I was a prodigal come back home and decided to focus on family instead of a career. To the surprise of many, I chose to move to Human Resources instead of taking a prestigious position working for the Chief Information Officer.
I was offered an opportunity to work for a previous manager and use my new project management skills to help the global HR organization while being available to my family and my faith. I learned the ins and outs of HR, which started me down a fifteen-year path in that field. I also began to go deeper with God and was asked to be the Elder of Kingdom Collaboration at the large church I was attending. My life seemed perfect. Promotions, recognition, and success lulled me into a false sense of security. It was easy to fall into the complacency trap of work, family, and church. Wake up and do it again. Don’t get me wrong, God was moving, great things were being accomplished at work and my family was thriving. But God had other ideas.
I remember the call when my manager asked if I wanted to move to Malaysia. It would be a two-year assignment to parachute in, stabilize the organization, find a local replacement, and then back home to my comfortable life. My wife and I talked and we decided that we could live anywhere for two years. Our kids were still small, five and six, so it became a no-brainer to have this little side adventure in life. I packed up the family and move to a small island in Southeast Asia to run the Human Resource Operations across the region. Two years turned to four years. The kids grew, my understanding of God grew, but work continued to be the primary focus. While the travel was glamorous, spending half of my time away from the family did not help with the commitment to spend more time with my wife and children. But God continued to use this time to teach us new things about Him, even if work was still my passion.
After four years, we moved to Japan and we faced completely different adventures and challenges. I took a role as head of HR for the Japan business. We left a vibrant expat and church community and landed in a very isolated place. It was a challenging time personally, but professionally it was a great job. I loved living in Japan and I was able to build great relationships with the employees at the office. Since work continued to be my god, I was less concerned about not finding a church to attend. Besides, home churches were all the rage. So we would spend time as a family watching videos and sharing. We met missionaries and would worship with them from time to time. God used this time to take give us new insights and to continue building a relationship with Him.
When it was time to move back to the US, another company came calling and I decided to leave after a seventeen-year career. Feeling God was leading us to Atlanta for a new adventure, I started a job as a global Human Resource Director. This moved me into a very lonely time in my career. The work was not as exciting and the whole family struggled with the repatriation to America. But God was there continually chasing me to have a deeper relationship with Him. No sooner had we settled when I was asked to move to Russia to lead the HR organization in Central and Eastern Europe. Our family was on the move and I continued to add skills and capabilities to be the best employee possible. A year into the assignment the geo-political situation started to spiral downward and when the opportunity opened to move the family back to the US, I took it.
Moving back to Atlanta after a year and a half to take on the Chief Learning Officer role was a good career move. I was positioning myself for a bigger role and was getting corporate experience. It was a small team, but we accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. Until a previous manager recruited me to a new company in Dallas. I was finally getting the recognition I felt I deserved when I was offered a Vice President role. I packed up my family again, this time only a year later, and moved halfway across the country. I told myself it was ok since it was not halfway across the world. I had finally arrived and decided this would be the place I spend the rest of my career. I had been brought in to change the culture and to bring in new ideas. Every day was exciting and new until it wasn’t. Nine months in, everything changed.
God had other plans. I had made my career and job my god. While I was a follower of Jesus Christ, I had never given Him all of me and my life. I gave Him some of my life, but I held on to my job and my finances. So Jesus decided to get my attention. The manager who hired me left the company and shortly after that, the company decided they didn’t want to transform the culture. On a sunny Tuesday morning, nearly ten months after I joined the company, I found myself without a job. I had peace about it, but it was a completely new situation, as I had always had a job. I figured I was fine. I was given a severance package and was living in the hottest job market in the US. I just knew God was saving me from the company I was at and was going to quickly open up a new door so I could pocket the severance package. That is what a good father would do, right?
I believe Moses found himself in a similar situation. His life was blessed, by all accounts. He was saved by God and now lived in the Pharaoh’s house. He has everything he could ever hope for. He has access to wealth, servants, training, and good life. At some point in his life, he realized he was not Egyptian, but rather a Hebrew. I can imagine he watched the Hebrew slaves and began to hatch a plan on how to save them. Then one day he saw an opportunity to start his grand plan. He saved a Hebrew slave from being beaten. He killed the Egyptian guard. Instead of being grateful, the Hebrew’s showed him disdain. Fearing his life, Moses fell to the desert where he lived for forty years. (Exodus 2:11-15)
In a moment, Moses’ life changed, just like mine had. I can relate. Nothing made sense. Some of the most mysterious questions that people ask God came to mind. “Why me? What did I do wrong? Why is this happening?” Too many times, these are the wrong questions and don’t get answered. I am certain Moses must have asked God these questions, just as I had asked Him. While Moses lived in Midian for 40 years, he must have asked the question, “Is this all there is?” Did he know he was off track from his destiny? Did he know God had plans for something great to be accomplished through him? We don’t know, but I know during my 27 months of unemployment, I knew I was not supposed to stay there. I believed God would rescue me.
Through my time of unemployment, I believed I was in the time of wilderness. Somewhere in my mind, I believed that I was wandering around the desert, crying out to God. For the whole 27 months, I believed that and just knew when God finally opened the right job door, I would step into my promised land. My finances would be restored, my life would go back to normal and I would get back on the path God had for me. Unfortunately, like so many other things with God, I completely misinterpreted the stage I was in. I thought I was in the wilderness, wandering around. Instead, I was really in Egypt, as a slave to unemployment. Like the Hebrews (Exodus 3:7), I cried out every day for deliverance from unemployment. There was no movement, no freedom, a time of being disappointed and beaten down. It was a time when hopelessness nips at my heels. While I spend hours reading the bible, praying, writing and worshiping, God was silent. Not that He wasn’t speaking, I just wasn’t hearing anything about how He would save me from the stage I was in.
After 27 months, my retirement savings was all used up. I had over 500 interviews, sent over 3000 applications, and was a top finalist for a dozen jobs. Every one of them fell through. I knew we had to sell our house and planned on moving back in with my wife’s parents in another city. All seemed hopeless. We had come to our Red Sea moment. In front of us was the impossible task of finding a new employer and chasing us was our financial ruin. I didn’t want to pack up our house. I didn’t want to have to move again, wasn’t 45 times enough already? My Red Sea day will forever be etched in my memory. It was a Friday and I had just received a text from a hiring manager that I was the top candidate but they probably would not be able to hire me for a few months. As I stared into my personal Red Sea, my heart sank. Like the Israelites in Exodus 14:10-11, I cried out to the Lord and complained that I was brought to this point to die. My heart was broken, and we put our house on the market. In the hottest housing market in the US, we didn’t even get a showing that weekend. Why had God brought me to my Red Sea day, just to take me to complete ruin?
God had other plans. Just like He wanted to show the world His glory by saving the Israelites, He wanted to show me His love by parting my Red Sea. Three days later, on a Monday, I received another text from the hiring manager. He had the approval to make the offer. In a moment things changed. When all hope was lost, God made a way to survive. The next weekend we had three offers on the house and I moved to Buffalo three weeks later. I thought everything would magically be ok. I had a job, I could provide for my family. Surely, God would restore everything the locust had eaten. My retirement fund would be filled and our cub bard would be restocked. I believed I was stepping out of the wilderness and into my promise land. The season had changed. I was no longer in winter, but spring had come and everything would go back to the way it was. Nope. My circumstances had changed. My location had changed. However, I had just crossed the Red Sea, not the Jordan River. There is a significant difference between the two crossings. I thought I was saved and life would be easy. I thought it was time to sit back, smell the roses and let everything be restored. God had prepared the Promised Land for the Israelites. Farms, houses, and everything they would need to live a good life without having to do the heavy lifting. Sure, they had to battle the inhabitants, but God was with them and they won every battle. I wrongly believed this was the stage I was in, mainly because I thought I was in a new season. Every season has three phases and the Exodus story of the Israelites does as well. There is a middle stage, an In-between time that separates the time of bondage from the time of promise.
I find myself freed from the chains of unemployment. I am no longer a slave to crying out for a job and having a single focus. Yet, I am not in my Promised Land either. I am in the In-between time. My circumstances have changed, but my season has not. I am just in the heart of the season. What I realize right now is it is a time to rebuild my relationship with God and learn to commune with Him when I am not asking him for deliverance. It is a time of working through my frustrations and disappointments from the previous stage. This stage is a time to be hungry for Him and learn how to walk in complete obedience and reliance on Him. The Israelites should only have been in this stage a short time. Though they lost 40 years for not believing in Him. I don’t want to spend another 27 months in this phase if I can help it. So I am committed to learning the lessons of this phase so I can get to my personal Jordan River day.
What do you think? Are you in the In-between time as well? What are you learning? Maybe we can help each other get to our Promised Land faster!