A Different Story

As a university student, I made a practice of closing my eyes and imagining the enormous contribution I would one day make to saving the world. Once, when I still knew how to handle a paintbrush, watercolors and I even made the dream take shape on paper.

The image is a little faded now, the thick textured paper gone and the memory of it no better than fuzzy.

But I do remember this: that picture did not leave room for thing I do now.

It did not consider that one day I might be clicking the green arrow.

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In the twenty-plus years since I began to dream of world-changing, my career path has done nothing but snake along an odd, winding road. A new manager remarked during an orientation session that I had a “beautiful résumé.”

That, I believe, was a polite way to say “this is the weirdest looking thing I’ve ever seen.”

During one of those epiphanies to which college students are prone, I overhauled my course plans, changing my major and lopping classes off my schedule in order to reach a simple goal: to be unhireable. (Mom and Dad, this probably confirms all of your hunches.)

I left the university well-educated but with a degree that practically guaranteed that I would be underemployed.

Fear scraped away at my world-changing vision, fear that I would become just another one of the statistics our campus ministers held up of those who “settled out” after college and did not continue to serve God. (Of course, I see the folks with whom I ministered in college and the way so many of them continue to serve tirelessly now. I’d have to say those statistics merely reflected those who did not continue to do ministry in the off-campus world in the same way as we did it on-campus. That is, I find the statistics to be no small bit of hooey. But I digress.)

In short, ambition scared me. I sickened at the thought of waking up ten years after college to find myself successful in my profession, yet so much dead weight in the kingdom.

Now, was that change of course an act of faith, responding to God-direction?

Or was it the short-sighted knee-jerk of an immature and reckless university student?

Time will tell.

But as I sat numb-headed in front of a computer screen last week, clicking the green arrow, my idle mind revisited the question.

For this, I went to college?

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This sense that I am above the green arrow clicking, it’s fleeting. But I’d be dishonest if I said it never comes.

If you’ve been here long at all, you know that God rerouted my career path yet again this fall, as I found myself displaced through a corporate restructuring. Since then, He has been gracious to give the opportunity to launch a new business. And in the meantime, He also provided part-time hours at another local company. Again, I’ve changed jobs yet remain in the same office building. I simply change floors every five years or so.

Part of the work involves a data entry function that doesn’t call for explanation beyond saying it requires no thought and no effort (only Job-like patience).

I click the green arrow.

Then I sit and wait until I can click it again.

Last week when my pride and impatience got the best of me I scowled at the green arrow, cursing its entry into my life. I imagined all the important, valuable things I could do with those minutes stacking up between clicks.

And then, as He is so good to do so often, He whapped me square in the back of the head. (Something He can do with those of us whose heads are more block-shaped.)

Caught off balance, my face nearly smashed into the screen. (Or had I just been dozing?)

In His way, He reminded me of many things made possible by empty-headed arrow clicking. Things lost when I focus on the insignificance of the click, the deadening time between, and the perceived waste of my remarkable talents. He reminded me of these things:

Idiot time makes great prayer time. Moments when I must sit still, unable to do anything else, make for great prayer times. Umm, duh. I marvel at my thickness, sometimes.

A paycheck is a paycheck. While it may sound crass and shallow, I work for pay. When I look away from the green arrow just briefly, I am grateful for the opportunity to earn.

I work for His glory. Just His. Yes, I work for pay. But I also seek to spend my days — whether at work or at rest, in fellowship or solitude — doing what I do to His glory. We’re supposed to. He said to.

He provided. This work, even the arrow clicking, is clear evidence of His provision. I intended to work part-time while launching a new business. But I had not begun to look for said work. The job sought me out. And the most telling evidence of His perfect provision is that

I’m dreaming in Spanish. While I may make it the bigger deal, arrow-clicking is a time filler. It’s a task which must be done, assigned to me simply to make my hands useful between phone calls. But ultimately, it’s not what I was hired to do. My “real” work? To translate phone calls from Spanish-speaking clients. I get paid to practice the language I love. It’s enough of my day that I now dream in bilingual black and white.

That might not mean so much to you, but to me it means that clicking the green arrow is the best possible job I could have in my small community. It means that while I earn a wage and enjoy the flexibility of part-time hours while I build another business, I become better prepared to translate for my church’s bilingual services and build deeper relationships within our local Latino community.

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As a student, I thought to position myself to depart on a moment’s notice to save the world. Big dreams of big things done by a very big me.

Today, I see God’s big plans, and they play out in the seemingly small. World changing takes place around a family dinner table, through a small rural church, at a desk surrounded by short cubicle walls.

And the tribe and tongue and nation that holds my heart — the one I aimed to seek to the ends of the earth — that very people now resides in my back yard.

For their sake, He points me to the green arrow.

That He would tell me to click, this I couldn’t have known.

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