"Becoming a slave is easier than you think ..."
Good morning, last day of work!
I never notice the exact date, but I'm struck, with each ongoing employment, when I recognize that I've been in that job for longer than I've ever worked anywhere else. I've been at Fastsigns in Augusta since mid-July of 2005, and today's my last day.
First church job was the previous PR (personal record - sorry, i guess runner lingo does creep into my regular conversation these days) - East End Baptist Church, Columbus, MS, where i served 20 months as youth minister. Self-imposed burnout there is what sent me into the sign industry to start with, putting in a year at Signs First in Columbus, before leaving to pursue seminary training.
Except i didn't get to pursue seminary training just then. Two months unemployed doesn't do much for school savings, and what it actually landed me was a one-way ticket to Grown-Up Ville, boarding with the family of a college friend in a city and state i'd never lived. I wouldn't have guessed that, and the sign job it soon provided, would be my in-road to ministry renewal and the new (and soon-to-begin, now) seminary training program.
Also, i wouldn't have expected for that friend, the one whose family i stayed with, to become my wife. And yet here we are. Color me FAR from disappointed. 8')
Nobody likes ruts except tire repairmen, and I'm a terrible repairman of most anything. And four years in one job is long enough to go in and out of several ruts. Part of why I mark whenever I've been somewhere longer than anywhere else before it is because I'm a slave to routine (perfectionist personality and all that), but I also hate the feeling of redundancy. I'm sure if I could focus on it long enough, I'd have a Serenity Prayer of my own for the situation:
Lord, grant me the grace
to receive the familiar without contempt
and the unforeseen without panic.
Something like that, maybe, I dunno.
Our routine the past couple weeks has been suitcase living, and we've got another week of that to go before we meet back up with two storage cubes full of The Familiar, stuff we shipped ahead of us to our new seminary home. Unpacking can become the work of an extremely nebulous time frame, especially with one person searching for full-time employment and the other diving into full-time graduate study. So we've certainly got a few more weeks left before any comfortable routine is bound to settle us in.
But who ever said school had to be boring?
Grace and peace to you while we're busy making other plans,
Mike
I never notice the exact date, but I'm struck, with each ongoing employment, when I recognize that I've been in that job for longer than I've ever worked anywhere else. I've been at Fastsigns in Augusta since mid-July of 2005, and today's my last day.
First church job was the previous PR (personal record - sorry, i guess runner lingo does creep into my regular conversation these days) - East End Baptist Church, Columbus, MS, where i served 20 months as youth minister. Self-imposed burnout there is what sent me into the sign industry to start with, putting in a year at Signs First in Columbus, before leaving to pursue seminary training.
Except i didn't get to pursue seminary training just then. Two months unemployed doesn't do much for school savings, and what it actually landed me was a one-way ticket to Grown-Up Ville, boarding with the family of a college friend in a city and state i'd never lived. I wouldn't have guessed that, and the sign job it soon provided, would be my in-road to ministry renewal and the new (and soon-to-begin, now) seminary training program.
Also, i wouldn't have expected for that friend, the one whose family i stayed with, to become my wife. And yet here we are. Color me FAR from disappointed. 8')
Nobody likes ruts except tire repairmen, and I'm a terrible repairman of most anything. And four years in one job is long enough to go in and out of several ruts. Part of why I mark whenever I've been somewhere longer than anywhere else before it is because I'm a slave to routine (perfectionist personality and all that), but I also hate the feeling of redundancy. I'm sure if I could focus on it long enough, I'd have a Serenity Prayer of my own for the situation:
Lord, grant me the grace
to receive the familiar without contempt
and the unforeseen without panic.
Something like that, maybe, I dunno.
Our routine the past couple weeks has been suitcase living, and we've got another week of that to go before we meet back up with two storage cubes full of The Familiar, stuff we shipped ahead of us to our new seminary home. Unpacking can become the work of an extremely nebulous time frame, especially with one person searching for full-time employment and the other diving into full-time graduate study. So we've certainly got a few more weeks left before any comfortable routine is bound to settle us in.
But who ever said school had to be boring?
Grace and peace to you while we're busy making other plans,
Mike